ASPECTS  OFi 
MODERN  OPER 


It     P 


I     II 


LAWRENCE  GILM AN 


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V  i 


ASPECTS   OF  MODERN   OPERA 


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ASPECTS     OF 
MODERN  OPERA 

Estimates  and  Inquiries 

BY 

LAWRENCE    OILMAN 


AUTHOR    OF 


The  Music  of  To-morrow,"  "  Phases  of  Modern  Music,"  "Stories 
of  Symphonic  Music,"  "  Edward  MacDowell :  A  Sludy»" 
"  Strauss'  '  Salome  ' :  A  Guide  to  the  Opera," 
"Debussy's  'Pelleas  et  Melisande':A 
Guide  to  the  Opera,"  etc. 


New  York  :  JOHN  LANE  COMPANY 
London  :  JOHN  LANE,  THE  BODLEY  HEAD 

MCMIX 


]^V.\^o^ 


Q- 


Copyright,  1908, 
John  Lank  Company 


THE  UNIVERSITY  PRESS,  CAMBRIDGE,  U.S.A. 


>T^ 


TO 

ERNEST   NEWMAN 

A    CRITIC    OF 

BREADTH,   WISDOM,  AND   INDEPENDENCE 

THESE  STUDIES 

ARE  APPRECIATIVELY   INSCRIBED 


302450 


CONTENTS 

Page 

Introductory:  The  Wagnerian 

Aftermath i 

A  View  of  Puccini 31 

Strauss'    "Salome":     Its    Art 
AND  its  Morals 6^ 

A  Perfect  Music-Drama     .     .   107 


INTRODUCTORY 

THE   WAGNERIAN   AFTER- 
MATH 


INTRODUCTORY 

THE   WAGNERIAN   AFTER- 
MATH 

Since  that  day  when,  a  quarter 
of  a  century  ago,  Richard  Wagner 
ceased  to  be  a  dynamic  figure  in 
the  life  of  the  world,  the  history 
of  operatic  art  has  been,  save  for  a 
few  conspicuous  exceptions,  a  bar- 
ren and  unprofitable  page;  and  it 
has  been  so,  in  a  considerable  de- 
gree, because  of  him.  When  Mr. 
William  F.  Apthorp,  in  his  admi- 
rable history  of  the  opera  —  a  book 
written  with  unflagging  gusto  and 
3 


ASPECTS   OF 

vividness  —  observed  that  Wagner's 
style  has  been,  since  his  death,  little 
imitated,  he  made  an  astonishing 
assertion.  "  If  by  Wagner's  influ- 
ence,'' he  went  on,  "is  meant  the 
influence  of  his  individuality,  it 
may  fairly  be  said  to  have  been 
null.  In  this  respect  Wagner  has 
had  no  more  followers  than  Mozart 
or  Beethoven ;  he  has  founded  no 
school."  Again  one  must  exclaim  : 
An  astonishing  affirmation!  and  it 
is  not  the  first  time  that  it  has  been 
made,  nor  will  it  be  the  last.  Yet 
how  it  can  have  seemed  a  reason- 
able thing  to  say  is  one  of  the  in- 
soluble  mysteries.     The    influence 

4 


MODERN   OPERA 

of  Wagner  —  the  influence  of  his 
individuality  as  well  as  of  his  prin- 
ciples —  upon  the  musical  art  of 
the  past  twenty-five  years  has 
been  simply  incalculable.  It  has 
tinged,  when  it  has  not  dyed  and 
saturated,  every  phase  and  form  of 
creative  music,  from  the  opera  to 
the  sonata  and  string  quartet. 

It  is  not  easy  to  understand  how 
anyone  who  is  at  all  familiar  with 
the  products  of  musical  art  in 
Europe  and  America  since  the  death 
of  the  tyrant  of  Bayreuth  can  be 
disposed  to  question  the  fact.  No 
composer  who  ever  lived  influenced 

so  deeply  the  music  that  came  after 

5 


ASPECTS   OF 

him  as  did  Wagner.  It  is  an  influ- 
ence that  is,  of  course,  waning  ;  and 
to  the  definite  good  of  creative  art, 
for  it  has  been  in  a  large  degree 
pernicious  and  oppressive  in  its  effect. 
The  shadow  of  the  most  pervasive 
of  modern  masters  has  laid  a  sinister 
and  paralysing  magic  upon  almost 
all  of  his  successors.  They  have 
sought  to  exert  his  spells,  they 
have  muttered  what  they  imagined 
were  his  incantations  ;  yet  the  thing 
which  they  had  hoped  to  raise  up 
in  glory  and  in  strength  has  stub- 
bornly refused  to  breathe  with  any 
save  an  artificial  and  feeble  life. 
None  has  escaped  the  contagion  of 


MODERN    OPERA 

his  genius,  though  some,  whom 
we  shall  later  discuss,  have  opposed 
against  it  a  genius  and  a  creative 
passion  of  their  own.  Yet  in  the 
domain  of  the  opera,  wherewith 
we  are  here  especially  concerned, 
it  is  an  exceedingly  curious  and 
interesting  fact  that  out  of  the 
soil  which  he  enriched  with  his 
own  genius  have  sprung,  paradoxi- 
cally, the  only  living  and  indepen- 
dent forces  in  the  lyrico-dramatic 
art  of  our  time. 

Let  us  consider,  first,  those  as- 
pects of  the  operatic  situation 
which,  by  reason  of  the  paucity 
of  creative  vitality  that  they  con- 


ASPECTS   OF 

note,  are,  to-day,  most  striking; 
and  here  we  shall  be  obliged  to 
turn  at  once  to  Germany.  The 
more  one  hears  of  the  new  music 
that  is  being  put  forth  by  Teutonic 
composers,  the  stronger  grows  one's 
conviction  of  the  lack,  with  a 
single  exception,  of  any  genuine 
creative  impulse  in  that  country  to- 
day. It  is  doubtless  a  little  unrea- 
sonable to  expect  to  be  able  to  agree 
in  this  matter  with  the  amiable  lady 
who  told  Matthew  Arnold  that  she 
liked  to  think  that  aesthetic  excel- 
lence was  "common  and  abundant.'* 
As  the  sagacious  Arnold  pointed  out, 
it  is  not  in  the  nature  of  aesthetic  ex- 

8 


MODERN    OPERA 

cellence  that  it  should  be  "  common 
and  abundant '' ;  on  the  contrary, 
he  observed,  excellence  dwells 
among  rocks  hardly  accessible,  and 
a  man  must  almost  wear  out  his 
heart  before  he  can  reach  her.  All 
of  this  is  quite  unanswerable ;  yet, 
so  far  as  musical  Germany  is  con- 
cerned, is  not  the  situation  rather 
singular?  Germany  —  the  Ger- 
many which  yielded  the  royal  line 
founded  by  Bach  and  continued  by 
Mozart,  Beethoven,  Schubert,  Schu- 
mann, Wagner,  and  Brahms  —  can 
show  us  to-day,  save  for  that  excep- 
tion which  we  shall  later  discuss, 
only  a  strenuous  flock  of  Lilliputians 


ASPECTS   OF 

(whom  it  would  be  fatuous  to  dis- 
cuss with  particularity),  each  one  of 
whom  is  confidently  aware  that  the 
majestic  mantle  of  the  author  of 
"  Tristan"  has  descended  upon  him- 
self. They  write  music  in  which 
one  grows  weary  of  finding  the  same 
delinquency — the  invariable  fault  of 
emptiness,  of  poverty  of  idea,  allied 
with  an  extreme  elaboration  in  the 
manner  of  presentation.  And  it  is 
most  deliberate  and  determined  in 
address.  One  would  think  that  the 
message  about  to  be  delivered  were 
of  the  utmost  consequence,  the 
deepest  moment :  the  pose  and  the 
manner  of  the  bearer  of  great  tid- 

lO 


MODERN    OPERA 

ings  are  admirably  simulated.  Yet 
the  actual  deliverance  is  futile  and 
dull,  pathetically  meagre,  causing 
us  to  wonder  how  often  we  must 
remind  ourselves  that  it  is  as  im- 
possible to  achieve  salient  or  dis- 
tinguished or  noble  music  without 
salient,  distinguished,  and  noble 
ideas  as  it  is  to  create  fire  without 
flame. 

In  France  there  are  —  again  with 
an  exception  to  which  we  shall  later 
advert  —  Saint-Saens,  d'Indy,  Mas- 
senet, Charpentier,  and  —  les  autres. 

Now  Saint-Saens  is  very  far  from 

being  a  Wagnerian.     He  is,  indeed, 

nothing  very  definite  and  determin- 
II 


ASPECTS   OF 

able.  He  is  M.  Saint-Saens,  an 
abstraction,  a  brain  without  a  per- 
sonality. It  is  almost  forty  years 
since  Hector  Berlioz  called  him 
"  one  of  the  greatest  musicians  of 
our  epoch/'  and  since  then  the  lus- 
tre of  his  fame  has  waxed  steadily, 
until  to-day  one  must  recognise 
him  as  one  of  the  three  or  four 
most  distinguished  living  composers. 
Venerable  and  urbane,  M.  Saint- 
Saens,  at  the  New  York  opening  of 
the  American  tour  which  he  made  in 
his  seventy-second  year,  sat  at  the 
piano  before  the  audience  whom  he 
had  travelled  three  thousand  miles  to 
meet,  and  played  a  virtuoso  piece 

12 


MODERN   OPERA 

with  orchestral  accompaniment,  and 
two  shorter  pieces  for  piano  and 
orchestra:  a  valse-caprice  called 
**  Wedding  Cake,"  and  an  "Allegro 
Appassionato/'  That  is  to  say,  M. 
Camille  Saint-Saens,  the  bearer  of 
an  internationally  famous  and  most 
dignified  name,  braved  the  tragic 
perils  of  the  deep  to  exhibit  him- 
self before  a  representative  Ameri- 
can audience  as  the  composer  of 
the  "  Wedding  Cake "  valse-ca- 
price, an  entertaining  fantasy  on 
exotic  folk-themes,  and  2ijeu  d' esprit 
with  a  pleasant  tune  and  some  pretty 
orchestral  embroidery. 

No  one  could  have  it  in  his  heart 
"3 


ASPECTS   OF 

to  chide  M.  Saint-Saens  for  these 
things,  for  he  is  very  venerable  and 
very  famous.  Yet  is  not  the  occur- 
rence indicative,  in  a  way,  of  M.  Saint 
Saens's  own  attitude  toward  his  art  ? 
—  that  facile,  brilliant,  admirably 
competent,  chameleon-like  art  of 
his,  so  adroit  in  its  external  fashion- 
ing, yet  so  thin  and  worn  in  its 
inner  substance!  One  wonders  if, 
in  the  entire  history  of  music, 
there  is  the  record  of  a  composer 
more  completely  accomplished  in 
his  art,  so  exquisite  a  master  of  the 
difficult  trick  of  spinning  a  musical 
web,  so  superb  a  mechanician,  who 
has  less  to  say  to  the  world :  whose 


MODERN   OPERA 

discourse  is  so  meagre  and  so  negli- 
gible. One  remembers  that  unfortu- 
nate encomium  of  Gounod's,  which 
has  been  so  often  turned  into  a  jus- 
tified reproach  :  "  Saint  Saens,"  said 
the  composer  of  "Faust,"  "will 
write  at  will  a  work  in  the  style  of 
Rossini,  of  Verdi,  of  Schumann,  of 
Wagner."  The  pity  of  his  case  is 
that,  when  he  writes  pure  Saint- 
Saens,  one  does  not  greatly  care  to 
listen.  He  has  spoken  no  musical 
thought,  in  all  his  long  and  scintil- 
lant  career,  that  the  world  will  long 
remember.  His  dozen  operas,  his 
symphonic  poems,  his  sympho- 
nies, his  concertos,  the  best  of  his  / 

1 
15 


ASPECTS   OF 

chamber  works  —  is  there  in  them 
an  accent  which  one  can  soberly 
call  either  eloquent  or  deeply  beau- 
tiful? Do  they  not  excel  solely 
by  reason  of  their  symmetry  and 
solidity  of  structure,  their  deft  and 
ingenious  delivery  of  ideas  which 
at  their  worst  are  banal  and  at  their 
best  mediocre  or  derivative?  "A 
name  always  to  be  remembered  with 
respect ! "  cries  one  of  his  most 
sane  and  just  admirers  :  since  "  in  the 
face  of  practical  difficulties,  discour- 
agements, misunderstandings,  sneers, 
he  has  worked  constantly  to  the 
best  of  his  unusual  ability  for  musi- 
cal righteousness  in  its  pure  form/* 
i6 


MODERN    OPERA 

"A  name  to  be  remembered  with 
respect/'  beyond  dispute  :  with  the 
respect  that  is  due  the  man  of  su- 
pereminent  intelligence,  the  fas- 
tidious artisan,  the  tireless  and  hon- 
ourable workman  —  with  respect, 
yes ;  but  scarcely  with  enthusiasm. 
He  never,  as  has  been  truly  said, 
bores  one ;  it  is  just  as  true  that  he 
never  stimulates,  moves,  transports, 
or  delights  one,  in  the  deeper 
sense  of  the  term.  At  its  best,  it 
is  a  hard  and  dry  light  that  shines 
out  of  his  music :  a  radiance  with- 
out magic  and  without  warmth. 
His  work  is  an  impressive  monu- 
ment to  the  futility  of  art  without 

2  17 


ASPECTS    OF 

impulse :  to  the  immeasurable  dis- 
tance that  separates  the  most  ex- 
quisite talent  from  the  merest 
genius.  For  all  its  brilliancy  of  in- 
vestiture, his  thought,  as  the  most 
liberal  of  his  appreciators  has  said, 
"  can  never  wander  through  eter- 
nity" —  a  truth  which  scarcely 
needed  the  invocation  of  the  Mil- 
tonic  line  to  enforce.  It  may  be 
true,  as  Mr.  Philip  Hale  has  as- 
serted, that  "  the  success  of  d'Indy, 
Faure,  Debussy,  was  made  possible 
by  the  labor  and  the  talent  of  Saint- 
Saens  "  ;  yet  it  is  one  of  the  pities 
of  his  case  that  when  Saint-Saens's 
name  shall  have  become  faint  and 

i8 


MODERN    OPERA 

fugitive  in  the  corridors  of  time, 
the  chief  glories  of  French  art  in 
our  day  will  be  held  to  be,  one  may- 
venture,  the  legacies  of  the  compos- 
ers of  "  Pelleas  et  Melisande  "  and 
the  *'  Jour  d'ete  a  la  montagne," 
rather  than  of  the  author  of  "  Sam- 
son et  Dalila**  and  "  Le  Rouet 
d'Omphale."  Which  brings  one 
to  M.  Vincent  d'Indy. 

Now  M.  d'Indy  offers  a  curious 
spectacle  to  the  inquisitive  observer, 
in  that  he  is,  in  one  regard,  the  very 
symbol  of  independence,  of  artistic 
emancipation,  whereas,  in  another 
phase  of  his  activity,  he  is  a  mere 

echo  and  simulacrum.    As  a  writer 
19 


ASPECTS   OF 

for  the  concert  room,  as  a  composer 
of  imaginative  orchestral  works  and 
of  chamber  music,  he  is  one  of  the 
most  inflexibly  original  and  self- 
guided  composers  known  to  the  con- 
temporary world  of  music.  With  his 
aloofness  and  astringency  of  style,  his 
persistent  austerity  of  temper,  his  in- 
vincible hatred  of  the  sensuous, 
his  detestation  of  the  kind  of 
"felicity"  which  is  a  goal  for 
lesser  men,  this  remarkable  musi- 
cian—  who,  far  more  deservingly 
than  the  incontinent  Chopin,  de- 
serves the  title  of  "the  proudest 
poetic  spirit  of  our  time"  —  this 
remarkable     musician,     one    must 


MODERN   OPERA 

repeat,  is  the  sort  of  creative  artist 
who  is  writing,  not  for  his  day, 
but  for  a  surprised  and  appre- 
hending futurity.  He  is  at  once  a 
man  of  singularly  devout  and  simple 
nature,  and  an  entire  mystic.  For 
him  the  spectacle  of  the  living 
earth,  in  lovely  or  forbidding 
guise,  evokes  reverend  and  exalted 
moods.  His  approach  to  its  won- 
ders is  Wordsworthian  in  its  deep 
and  awe-struck  reverence  and  its 
fundamental  sincerity.  He  does 
not,  like  his  younger  artistic  kins- 
man, Debussy,  see  in  it  all  man- 
ner of  fantastic  and  mist-enwrapped 
visions;     it     is     not    for     him     a 

21 


ASPECTS   OF 

pageant  of  delicate  and  shining 
dreams.  Mallarme's  lazy  and  in- 
dulgent Faun  in  amorous  woodland 
reverie  would  not  have  suggested  to 
him,  as  to  Debussy,  music  whose 
sensuousness  is  as  exquisitely  con- 
cealed as  it  is  marvellously  transfig- 
ured. The  mysticism  of  d'Indy  is 
pre-eminently  religious;  it  has  no 
tinge  of  sensuousness;  it  is  large 
and  benign  rather  than  intimate 
and  intense. 

He  is  absolutely  himself,  abso- 
lutely characteristic,  for  example, 
in  his  tripartite  tone-poem,  "  Jour 
d'ete  a  la  montagne."  This  music 
is  a  hymn  the  grave  ecstasy  and  the 

22 


MODERN   OPERA 

utter  sincerity  of  which  are  as  evi- 
dent as  they  are  impressive.  In 
its  art  it  is  remarkable  —  not  so 
monumental  in  plan,  so  astound- 
ingly  complex  in  detail,  as  his 
superb  B-minor  symphony,  yet  a 
work  that  is  full  of  his  peculiar 
traits. 

Now  it  would  seem  as  if  so 
fastidious  and  individual  a  musician 
as  this  might  do  something  of  very 
uncommon  quality  if  he  once  turned 
his  hand  to  opera-making.  Yet  in 
his  "  L'Etranger,"  completed  only 
a  year  before  he  began  work  on 
his  astonishing  B-minor  symphony, 

and  in  his   "  Fervaal*'    (1889-95), 
23 


ASPECTS   OF 

we  have  the  melancholy  spectacle 
of  M.  d'Indy  concealing  his  own 
admirable  and  expressive  counte- 
nance behind  an  ill-fitting  mask 
modelled  imperfectly  after  the  lin- 
eaments of  Richard  Wagner.  In 
these  operas  (d'Indy  calls  them,  by 
the  way,  an  action  dramatique  and 
an  action  fnusicale :  evident  deriva- 
tions from  the  "  Tristan  "-esque 
Handlung)  —  in  these  operas,  the 
speech,  from  first  to  last,  is  the 
speech  of  Wagner.  The  themes, 
the  harmonic  structure,  the  use  of 
the  voice,  the  plots  (d'Indy,  like 
Wagner,  is  his  own  librettist)  — 
all  is  uncommuted  Wagnerism, 
24 


MODERN  OPERA 

with  some  of  the  Teutonic  cum- 
brousness  deleted  and  some  of 
the  Gallic  balance  and  measure 
infused.  These  scores  have  occa- 
sional beauty,  but  it  is  seldom  the 
beauty  that  is  peculiar  to  d'Indy's 
own  genius :  it  is  an  imported  and 
alien  beauty,  a  beauty  that  has  in  it 
an  element  of  betrayal. 

We  find  ourselves  confronting  a 
situation  that  is  equally  dispiriting 
to  the  seeker  after  valuable  achieve- 
ments in  contemporary  French 
opera  when  we  view  the  perform- 
ances of  such  minor  personages  as 
Massenet,   Bruneau,   Reyer,    Erlan- 

ger,  and  Charpentier.     They  are  all 
25 


ASPECTS   OF 

tarred,  in  a  great  or  small  degree, 
with  the  Wagnerian  stick.  When 
they  speak  out  of  their  own  hearts 
and  understandings  they  are  far 
from  commanding:  they  are  vul- 
garly sentimental  or  prettily  las- 
civious, like  the  amiable  Massenet, 
or  pretentious  and  banal,  like  Bru- 
neau,  or  incredibly  dull,  like  Reyer, 
or  picturesquely  superficial,  like 
Charpentier  —  though  the  author 
of  "  Louise  "  disports  himself  with 
a  beguiling  grace  and  verve  which 
almost  causes  one  to  forgive  his 
essential  emptiness. 

Modern    Italy  discloses  a  single 

dominant     and    vivid    figure.      In 
26 


MODERN   OPERA 

none  of  his  compatriots  is  there 
any  distinction  of  speech,  of  char- 
acter. In  that  country  the  mem- 
ory of  Wagner  is  less  imperious 
in  its  control ;  yet  not  one  of  its 
living  music-makers,  with  the  ex- 
ception that  I  have  made,  has  that 
atmosphere  and  quality  of  his 
own  which  there  is  no  mistaking. 

I  have  referred  by  implication 
and  reservation  to  three  personali- 
ties in  the  art  of  the  modern  lyric- 
drama  who  stand  out  as  salient 
figures  from  the  confused  and  amor- 
phous   background   against    which 

they    are    to    be    observed :    who 
27 


ASPECTS    OF 

seem  to  me  to  represent  the  only 
significant  and  important  mani- 
festations of  the  creative  spirit 
which  have  thus  far  come  to  the 
surface  in  the  post-Wagnerian 
music-drama.  They  are,  it  need 
scarcely  be  said,  Puccini  in  Italy, 
Richard  Strauss  in  Germany,  and 
Debussy  in  France.  Yet  these 
men  built  upon  the  foundations 
laid  by  Wagner ;  they  took  many 
leaves  from  his  vast  book  of  in- 
structions, in  some  cases  stopping 
short  of  the  full  reach  of  his 
plans  as  imagined  by  himself,  in 
other    cases  carrying    his    schemes 

to    a    point    of    development    far 

28 


MODERN    OPERA 

beyond  any  result  of  which  he 
dreamed.  But  they  have  not  at- 
tempted to  say  the  things  which 
they  had  to  say  in  the  way  that  he 
would  have  said  them.  They  have 
been  content  with  their  own  elo- 
quence; and  it  has  not  betrayed 
them.  No  one  is  writing  music 
for  the  stage  which  has  the  profile, 
the  saliency,  the  vitality,  the 
personal  flavour,  which  distinguish 
the  productions  of  these  men.  So 
far  as  it  is  possible  to  discern  from 
the  present  vantage-ground,  the 
future  —  at  least  the  immediate 
future  —  of     the     lyric     stage     is 

theirs.     In  no  other  quarters  may 
29 


MODERN   OPERA 

one  observe  any  manifestations  that 
are  not  either  negligible  by  reason 
of  their  own  quality,  or  mere  dilu- 
tions, with  or  without  adulterous 
admixtures,  of  the  Wagnerian 
brew. 


30 


A    VIEW    OF    PUCCINI 


A  VIEW  OF  PUCCINI 

A  PLAIN-SPOKEN  and  not  too  rev- 
erent observer  of  contemporary  mu- 
sical manners,  discussing  the  melodic 
style  of  the  Young  Italian  opera- 
makers,  has  observed  that  it  is 
fortunate  in  that  it  "  gives  the  sing- 
ers opportunity  to  pour  out  their 
voices  in  that  lavish  volume  and  in- 
tensity which  provoke  applause  as 
infallibly  as  horseradish  provokes 
tears."  The  comment  has  a  good 
deal  of  what  Sir  Willoughby  Pat- 

terne    would   have   called    "rough 
3  33 


ASPECTS   OF 

truth."  It  is  fairly  obvious  that 
there  is  nothing  in  the  entire  range 
of  opera  so  inevitably  calculated  to 
produce  an  instant  effect  as  a  certain 
kind  of  frank  and  sweeping  lyricism 
allied  v^ith  swiftness  of  dramatic 
emotion;  and  it  is  because  the 
young  lions  of  modern  Italy  — 
Puccini  and  his  lesser  brethren  — 
have  profoundly  appreciated  this 
elemental  truth,  that  they  address 
their  generation  with  so  immediate 
an  effect. 

In  those  days  when  the  impetus 
of  a  pristine  enthusiasm  drove  the 
more  intelligent  order  of  opera- 
goers  to  performances  of  Wagner, 

34 


MODERN   OPERA 

it  was  a  labour  of  love  to  learn  to 
know  and  understand  the  texts  of 
his  obscure  and  laboured  dramas  ; 
and  even  the  guide-books,  which 
were  as  leaves  in  Vallombrosa,  were 
prayerfully  studied.  But  to-day 
there  are  no  Wagnerites.  We  are 
no  longer  impelled  by  an  apostolic 
fervour  to  delve  curiously  into  the 
complex  geneaology  and  elaborate 
ethics  of  the  "  Ring/*  and  it  is  no 
longer  quite  clear  to  many  slothful 
intelligences  just  what  Tristan  and 
Isolde  are  talking  about  in  the  dusk 
of  King  Mark's  garden.  There 
will  always  be  a  small  group  of  the 
faithful  who,  through  invincible 
35 


ASPECTS   OF 

and  loving  study,  will  have  learned 
by  heart  every  secret  of  these  dramas. 
But  for  the  casual  opera-goer,  grant- 
ing him  all  possible  intelligence  and 
intellectual  curiosity,  they  cannot 
but  seem  the  reverse  of  crystal- 
clear,  logical,  and  compact.  A 
score  of  years  ago  those  w^ho  cared 
at  all  for  the  dramatic  element  in 
opera,  and  the  measure  of  whose 
delight  was  not  filled  up  by  the 
vocal  pyrotechny  which  was  the 
mainstay  of  the  operas  of  the  older 
repertoire,  found  in  these  music- 
dramas  their  chief  solace  and  satis- 
faction. Wagner  reigned  then  vir- 
tually alone  over  his  kingdom. 
36 


MODERN    OPERA 

The  dignity,  the  imaginative  power, 
and  the  impressive  emotional  sweep 
of  his  dramas,  as  dramas,  offset  their 
obscurity  and  their  inordinate  bulk  ; 
and  always  their  splendid  investi- 
ture of  music  exerted,  in  and  of 
itself,  an  enthralling  fascination. 
And  that  condition  of  affairs  might 
have  continued  for  much  longer 
had  not  certain  impetuous  young 
men  of  modern  Italy  demonstrated 
the  possibility  of  writing  operas 
which  were  both  engrossing  on 
their  purely  dramatic  side  and,  in 
their  music,  eloquent  with  the  elo- 
quence that  had  come  to  be  ex- 
pected of  the  modern  opera-maker. 
37 


ASPECTS   OF 

Moreover,  these  music-dramas  had 
the  incalculable  merit,  for  our  time 
and  environment,  of  being  both 
swift  in  movement  and  unimpeach- 
ably  obvious  in  meaning.  There- 
upon began  the  reign  of  young 
Italy  in  contemporary  opera*  It 
was  inaugurated  with  the  "  Cav- 
aUeria  Rusticana "  of  Mascagni 
and  the  "  I  Pagliacci  '*  of  Leon- 
cavallo ;  and  it  is  continued  to-day, 
with  immense  vigour  and  persist- 
ence, by  Puccini  with  all  his  later 
works.  The  sway  of  the  com- 
poser of  "Tosca,"  **  Boheme,'*  and 
"  Madame  Butterfly  ''  is  triumphant 

and    wellnigh    absolute ;  and    the 

38 


MODERN    OPERA 

reasons  for  it  are  not  elusive.  He 
has  selected  for  musical  treatment 
dramas  that  are  terse  and  rapid  in 
action  and  intelligible  in  detail,  and 
he  has  underscored  them  with  music 
that  is  impassioned,  incisive,  highly- 
spiced,  rhetorical,  sometimes  poetic 
and  ingenious,  and  pervadingly 
sentimental.  Moreover,  he  pos- 
sesses, as  his  most  prosperous  attri- 
bute, that  facility  in  vs^riting  fervid 
and  often  banal  melodies  to  the 
immediate  and  unfailing  effect  of 
v^hich,  in  the  w^ords  of  Mr.  Henry 
T.  Finck,  I  have  alluded.  As  a 
sensitive  English  critic,  Mr.  Ver- 
non Blackburn,  once  very  happily 
39 


ASPECTS   OF 

observed,  Puccini  is  "  essentially  a 
man  of  his  own  generation  .  .  . 
the  one  who  has  caught  up  the 
spirit  of  his  time,  and  has  made 
his  compact  with  that  time,  in 
order  that  he  should  not  lose  any- 
thing which  a  contemporary  gener- 
ation might  give  him/' 

It  is  a  curious  and  striking  truth 
that  the  chief  trouble  with  the 
representative  musical  dramatists 
who  have  built,  from  the  stand- 
point of  system,  upon  the  founda- 
tional stones  that  Wagner  laid,  is 
not,  as  the  enemies  and  opponents  ' 
of  Bayreuth  used  to  charge,  an  ex- 
cess of  drama  at  the  expense  of  the 
40 


MODERN   OPERA 

music,  but — as  was  the  case  with 
Wagner  himself  (a  fact  which  I 
have  elsewhere  in  this  volume  at- 
tempted to  demonstrate) — an  ex- 
cess of  music  at  the  expense  of  the 
drama:  in  short,  the  precise  defect 
against  which  reformers  of  the 
opera  have  inveighed  since  the 
days  of  Gluck.  With  Richard 
Strauss  this  musical  excess  is  or- 
chestral; with  the  modern  Italians 
it  implicates  the  voice-parts,  and  is 
manifested  in  a  lingering  devotion 
to  full-blown  melodic  expression 
achieved  at  the  expense  of  dra- 
matic truth,  logic,  and  consistency. 
In  this,  Puccini  has  simply,  in  the 
41 


ASPECTS    OF 

candid  phrase  of  Mr.  Blackburn, 
"  caught  up  the  spirit  of  his  time, 
and  made  his  compact  with  that 
time."  That  is  to  say,  he  has, 
with  undoubted  artistic  sincerity, 
played  upon  the  insatiable  desire  of 
the  modern  ear  for  an  ardent 
and  elemental  kind  of  melodic 
effect,  and  upon  the  acquired 
desire  of  the  modern  intelligence 
for  a  terse  and  dynamic  substra- 
tum of  drama.  His  fault,  from 
what  I  hold  to  be  the  ideal  stand- 
point in  these  matters,  is  that  he 
has  not  perfectly  fused  his  music 
and  his  drama.  There  is  a  suffi- 
ciently concrete  example  of  what 
42 


MODERN    OPERA 

I  mean — an  example  which  points 
both  his  strength  and  his  weak- 
ness—  in  the  second  act  of 
"Tosca/*  where  he  halts  the 
cumulative  movement  of  the  scene 
between  Scarpia  and  Tosca,  which 
he  has  up  to  that  point  devel- 
oped with  superb  dramatic  logic, 
in  order  to  placate  those  who 
may  not  over-long  be  debarred 
from  their  lyrical  sweetmeats;  but 
also — for  it  would  be  absurd  to 
charge  him  with  insincerity  or 
time-serving  in  fhis  matter  —  in 
order  that  he  may  satisfy  his 
own  ineluctable  tendency  toward  a 
periodical  effusion  of  lyric  energy, 
43 


ASPECTS   OF 

which  he  must  yield  to  even  when 
dramatic  consistency  and  logic  go 
by  the  board  in  the  process;  when, 
in  short,  lyrical  expression  is  super- 
erogatory and  impertinent.  So  he 
writes  the  sentimental  and  facilely 
pathetic  prayer,  "  Visi  d'arte,  visi 
d'amore,''  dolcissimo  con  grande  sen-- 
timento:  a  perfectly  superfluous,  not 
to  say  intrusive,  thing  dramati- 
cally, and  a  piece  of  arrant  mu- 
sical vulgarity;  after  which  the 
current  of  the  drama  is  resumed. 
We  have  here,  in  fact,  noth- 
ing more  nor  less  respectable 
than  the  old-fashioned  Italian 
aria  of  unsavoury  fame:  it  is 
44 


MODERN    OPERA 

merely   couched  in    more  modern 
terms. 

The  offence  is  aggravated  by  the 
fact  that  Puccini,  in  common  with 
the  rest  of  the  Neo-Itahans,  is  at 
his  best  in  the  expression  of  dra- 
matic emotion  and  movement,  and 
at  his  worst  in  his  voicing  of  purely 
lyric  emotion,  meditative  or  passion- 
ate. In  its  lyric  portions  his  music 
is  almost  invariably  banal,  without 
distinction,  without  beauty  or  re- 
straint—  when  the  modern  Italian 
music-maker  dons  his  singing-robes 
he  becomes  clothed  with  common- 
ness and  vulgarity.  Thus  in  its 
scenes  of  amorous  exaltation  the 
45 


ASPECTS    OF 

music  of  "  Tosca/'  of  "  Madame 
Butterfly'*  (recall,  in  the  latter 
work,  the  flamboyant  commonness 
of  the  exultant  duet  which  closes 
the  first  act),  is  blatant  and  rhetor- 
ical, rather  than  searching  and 
poignant.  Puccini's  strength  lies 
in  the  truly  impressive  manner  in 
which  he  is  able  to  intensify  and 
underscore  the  more  dramatic  mo- 
ments in  the  action.  At  such  times 
his  music  possesses  an  uncommon 
sureness,  swiftness,  and  incisiveness ; 
especially  in  passages  of  tragic  fore- 
boding, of  mounting  excitement,  it 
is  gripping  and  intense  in  a  quite 

irresistible  degree.     Often,  at  such 
46 


MODERN    OPERA 

moments,  it  has  an  electric  quality 
of  vigour,  a  curious  nervous  strength. 
That  is  its  cardinal  merit :  its  spare, 
lithe,  closely-knit,  clean-cut,  im- 
mensely energetic  orchestral  en- 
forcement of  those  portions  of  the 
drama  where  the  action  is  swift, 
tense,  cumulative,  rather  than  of 
sentimental  or  amorous  connota- 
tion. Puccini  has,  indeed,  an  al- 
most unparalleled  capacity  for  a  kind 
of  orchestral  commentary  which  is 
both  forceful  and  succinct.  He 
wastes  no  words,  he  makes  no  su- 
perfluous gestures  :  he  is  masterfully 
direct,  pregnant,  expeditious,  com- 
pact. Could  anything  be  more 
47 


ASPECTS   OF 

admirable,  in  what  it  attempts  and 
brilliantly  contrives  to  do,  than  al- 
most the  entire  second  act  of 
"  Tosca,"  with  the  exception  of 
the  sentimental  and  obstructive 
Prayer  ?  How  closely,  with  what 
unswerving  fidelity,  the  music 
clings  to  the  contours  of  the  play  ; 
and  with  what  an  economy  of 
effort  its  effects  are  made  !  Puccini 
is  thus,  at  his  best,  a  Wagnerian  in 
the  truest  sense  —  a  far  more  con- 
sistent Wagnerian  than  was  Wagner 
himself. 

It  is  in  "  Tosca  "  that  he  should 
be  studied.      He  is  not  elsewhere 

so  sincere,  direct,  pungent,  telling. 

48 


MODERN    OPERA 

And  it  is  in  "Tosca/'  also,  that  his 
melodic  vein,  which  is  generally 
broad  and  copious  rather  than  fine 
and  deep,  yields  some  of  the  true 
and  individual  beauty  which  is  its 
occasional,  its  very  rare,  possession 
—  for  example,  to  name  it  at  its 
best,  the  poetic  and  exceedingly 
personal  music  which  accompanies 
the  advancing  of  dawn  over  the 
house-tops  of  Rome,  at  the  be- 
ginning of  the  last  act:  a  passage 
the  melancholy  beauty  and  sincere 
emotion  of  which  it  would  be 
difficult  to    overpraise. 

In  Puccini's  later  and  much  more 
elaborate    and     meticulous    "  Ma- 
4  49 


ASPECTS    OF 

dame  Butterfly,"  there  is  less  that 
one  can  unreservedly  delight  in  or 
definitely  deplore,  so  far  as  the 
music  itself  is  concerned.  It  is 
from  a  somewhat  different  angle 
that  one  is  moved  to  consider  the 
v^ork. 

In  choosing  the  subject  for  this 
music-drama,  Puccini  set  himself  a 
task  to  w^hich  even  his  extraordinary 
competency  as  a  lyric-dramatist  has 
not  quite  been  equal.  As  every 
one  knov^s,  the  story  for  v^hich 
Puccini  has  here  sought  a  lyrico- 
dramatic  expression  is  that  of  an 
American  naval  officer  who  mar- 
ries little  "  Madame  Butterfly  "  in 
50 


MODERN    OPERA 

Japan,  deserts  her,  and  cheerfully 
calls  upon  her  three  years  later 
with  the  **rear'  wife  whom  he 
has  married  in  America.  The 
name  of  this  amiable  gentleman  is 
Pinkerton — B.  F.  Pinkerton — or, 
in  full,  Benjamin  Franklin  Pinker- 
ton. Now  it  would  scarcely  seem 
to  require  elaborate  argument  to 
demonstrate  that  the  presence  in  a 
highly  emotional  lyric-drama  of  a 
gentleman  named  Benjamin  Frank- 
lin Pinkerton  —  a  gentleman  who 
is,  moreover,  the  hero  of  the  piece 
—  is,  to  put  it  briefly,  a  little  in- 
harmonious. The  matter  is  not 
helped  by  the  fact  that  the  action  is 
51 


ASPECTS    OF 

of  to-day,  and  that  one  bears  away 
from  the  performance  the  recollec- 
tion of  Benjamin  Franklin  Pinker- 
ton  asking  his  friend,  the  United 
States  consul  at  Nagasaki,  if  he 
will  have  some  whiskys-and-soda. 
There  lingers  also  a  vaguer  mem- 
ory of  the  consul  declaring,  in  a 
more  or  less  lyrical  phrase,  that 
he  "is  not  a  student  of  orni- 
thology." 

Let  no  one  find  in  these  remarks 
a  disposition  to  cast  a  doubt  upon 
the  seriousness  with  which  Puccini 
has  completed  his  work,  or  to 
ignore  those  features  of  "  Ma- 
dame Butterfly ''  which  compel  sin- 
52 


MODERN   OPERA 

cere  admiration.  But  recognition 
and  acknowledgment  of  these 
things  must  be  conditioned  by 
an  insistence  upon  the  fact  that 
such  a  task  as  Puccini  has  at- 
tempted here,  and  as  others 
have  attempted,  is  foredoomed  to 
a  greater  or  less  degree  of  artistic 
futility.  One  refers,  of  course,  to 
the  attempt  to  transfer  bodily  to 
the  lyric  stage,  for  purposes  of 
serious  expression,  a  contemporary 
subject,  with  all  its  inevitable  dross 
of  prosaic  and  trivially  familiar 
detail.  To  put  it  concretely,  the 
sense  of  humour  and  the  emotional 

sympathies  will  tolerate    the  spec- 
53 


ASPECTS   OF 

tacle    of  a  Tristan  or  a  Tannhduser 

or  a  Don  Giovanni  or  a  Pelleas  or 

a  F^wj-/  uttering   his  longings  and 

his    woes  in    opera;   but  they  will 

not    tolerate    the     spectacle    of  a 

Benjamin     Franklin     Pinkerton    of 

our    own     time    and    day     telling 

us,  in  song,  that  he  is  not  a  student 

of  ornithology.     The  thing  simply 

cannot  be  done  —  Wagner  himself 

could     not     impress    us     in    such 

circumstances.     The     chief   glory 

of     Wagner's    texts  —  no     matter 

what    one    may    think    of    them 

as  viable  and  effective  dramas  —  is 

their    ideal   suitability  for   musical 

translation.     Take,    for     example, 
54 


MODERN    OPERA 

the  text  of  "Tristan  und  Isolde": 
there  is  not  a  sentence,  scarcely  a 
word,  in  it,  which  is  not  fit  for 
musical  utterance  —  nothing  that  is 
incongruous,  pedestrian,  inept.  All 
that  is  foreign  to  the  essential 
emotions  of  the  play  has  been 
eliminated.  So  unsparingly  has  it 
been  subjected  to  the  alembic 
of  the  poet-dramatist's  imagina- 
tion that  it  has  been  wholly 
purged  of  all  that  is  superfluous 
and  -distracting,  all  that  can- 
not be  gratefully  assimilated  by 
the  music.  That  is  the  especial 
excellence    of    his    texts.      Opera, 

though  it    rests,    like    the     other 
55 


ASPECTS    OF 

arts,  heavily  upon  convention,  yet 
offers  at  bottom  a  reasonable  and 
defensible  vehicle  for  the  com- 
munication of  human  experience 
and  emotion.  But  it  is  not  a 
convincing  form,  and  no  genius, 
living  or  potential,  can  make  it  a 
convincing  form,  save  when  it  deals 
with  matters  removed  from  our 
quotidian  life  and  environment : 
save  when  it  presents  a  heightened 
and  alembicated  image  of  human 
*  experience.  Thus  we  accept,  with 
sympathy  and  approval,  **  Sieg- 
fried," "  Lohengrin,''  "  Die  Meis- 
tersinger,''     "  Don      Giovanni  '* — 

even,  at  a  pinch,  "  Tosca '' ;  but  we 
56 


MODERN   OPERA 

cannot,  if  we  allow  our  understand- 
ing and  our  sense  of  humour  free 
play,  accept  "  Madame  Butterfly,'* 
with  its  naval  lieutenant  of  to-day, 
its  American  consul  in  his  tan- 
coloured  "  spats,'*  and  its  whiskys- 
and-soda. 

This,  then,  was  the  prime  dis- 
advantage under  which  Puccini 
laboured.  He  was,  as  a  necessary 
incident  of  his  task,  confronted 
with  the  problem  of  setting  to 
music  a  great  deal  of  prosaic  and 
altogether  unlovely  dialogue,  essen- 
tial to  the  unfolding  of  the  action, 
no  doubt,  but  quite   fatal  to   lyric 

inspiration.     Under  these  circum- 
57 


ASPECTS    OF 

stances,  the  music  is  often  surpris- 
ingly successful ;  but  it  is  significant 
that  the  most  poetic  and  moving 
passages  in  the  score  are  those 
which  enforce  emotions  and  occa- 
sions which  have  no  necessary 
connection  with  time  or  place; 
which  are,  from  their  nature,  fit 
subjects  for  musical  treatment, — 
for  example,  such  a  passage  as  that 
at  the  end  of  the  second  act,  where 
Madame  Butterfly  and  her  child 
wait  through  the  long  night 
for  the  coming  of  the  faith- 
less Pinkerton;  for  here  the  mo- 
ment and  the  mood  to  be  expressed 

have     a     dignity     and     a     pathos 
58 


MODERN    OPERA 

entirely  outside  of  date  or  circum- 
stance. 

The  score,  as  a  whole,  compares 
unfavourably  with  that  of  "Tosca," 
which  still,  as  it  seems  to  me,  rep- 
resents Puccini  at  his  most  effective 
and  sincere.  In  "  Madame  Butter- 
fly'*  one  misses  the  salient  charac- 
terisation, the  gripping  intensity, 
the  sharpness  and  boldness  of  out- 
line that  make  "  Tosca  *'  so  notable 
an  accomplishment.  "Tosca,"  for 
all  its  occasional  commonness,  its 
melodic  banality ,js  a  work  of  im- 
menje^i^our  and  unguestionable 
individuality.      In    it  Puccini    has 

saturated  almost  every  page  of  the 

59 


ASPECTS    OF 

music  with  his  own  extremely 
vivid  personality  :  a  personality  that 
is  exceedingly  impressive  in  its 
crude  strength  and  directness;  he 
has,  in  this  score,  exploded  the 
strange  critical  legend  that  his 
style  is  little  more  than  a  blended 
echo  of  the  later  Verdi,  Ponchielli, 
and  Massenet.  The  music  of 
"Tosca"  is  not  often  distin- 
guished, but  it  is  singularly  strik- 
ing, potent,  and  original ;  no  one 
save  Puccini  could  possibly  have 
written  it.  But  since  then  this 
composer  has,  artistically  speaking, 
visited  Paris.      He  has  appreciated 

the  value  of  certain   harmonic  ex- 
60 


MODERN    OPERA 

periments  which  such  adventurous 
Frenchmen  as  Claude  Debussy, 
Maurice  Ravel,  and  others,  are 
making ;  he  has  appreciated  them 
so  sincerely  that  certain  pages  in 
**  Madame  Butterfly,"  as,  for  in- 
stance, the  lovely  interlude  between 
the  second  and  third  acts,  sound 
almost  as  if  they  had  been  con- 
trived by  Debussy  himself — a  Lat- 
inised Debussy,  of  course.  Puccini, 
in  short,  has  become  intellectually 
sophisticated,  and  he  has  learned 
gentler  artistic  manners,  in  the  in- 
terval between  the  composition  of 
"  Tosca ''  and  of  "  Madame  Butter- 
fly." The  music  of  the  latter 
6i 


ASPECTS    OF 

work  is  far  more  delicately  struc- 
tured and  subtle  than  anything  he 
had  previously  given  us,  and  it  has 
moments  of  conquering  beauty,  of 
great  tenderness,  of  superlative 
svs^eetness.  It  is,  beyond  question, 
a  charming  and  brilliant  score,  ex- 
ceedingly adroit  in  workmanship 
and  almost  invariably  effective. 
Yet,  after  such  excellences  have 
been  gladly  acknowledged,  one  is 
disturbingly  conscious  that  the  real, 
the  essential,  Puccini  has,  for  the 
most  part,  evaporated.  There  are 
other  voices  speaking  through  this 
music,    voices    that,  for    all    their 

charm   and   distinction    of  accent, 
62 


MODERN    OPERA 

seem  alien  and  a  little  insincere. 
Has  the  vital,  if  crude,  imagination 
which  gave  issue  to  the  music  of 
"Tosca"  acquired  finesse  and  deli- 
cacy at  a  cost  of  independent 
impulse  ? 


63 


STRAUSS'  "SALOME":   ITS 
ART  AND  ITS  MORALS 


STRAUSS'   "SALOME":  ITS 
ART   AND    ITS   MORALS 

That  Richard  Strauss  the 
opera-maker  is,  for  the  present, 
summed  up  in  Richard  Strauss  the 
composer  of  "Salome,''  would 
scarcely,  I  think,  be  disputed  by 
any  one  who  is  sympathetically 
cognisant  of  his  achievements  in 
that  role.  Neither  in  "  Gun- 
tram  "  nor  in  the  later  and  far 
more  characteristic  "  Feuersnot  " 
is  his  essential  quality  as  a  musical 

dramatist  so  fully  and  clearly  re- 
67 


ASPECTS    OF 

vealed  as  in  his  setting  of  the 
play  of  Wilde  to  which  he  has 
given  a  fugacious  immortality. 
Yet  in  discussing  this  astonishing 
work,  I  prefer  to  consider  it  in 
and  for  itself  rather  than  as  a 
touchstone  whereby  to  form  a 
general  estimate  of  Strauss  the 
dramatical  tone-poet ;  for  I  be- 
lieve that,  if  he  lives  and  pro- 
duces for  another  decade,  it  will 
be  seen  that  "Salome"  does 
not  furnish  a  just  or  adequate 
measure  of  Strauss'  indisputable 
genius  as  a  writer  of  music  for  the 
stage.      I  believe   that  he    has  not 

given    us    here    a    valid   or    com- 
68 


MODERN   OPERA 

pletely  representative  account  of 
himself  in  that  capacity.  So  re- 
markable, though,  is  the  work 
in  itself,  so  assertive  in  its  chal- 
lenge to  contemporary  criticism, 
that  it  imperatively  compels  some  at- 
tempt at  appraisement  in  any  delib- 
erate survey  of  modern  operatic  art. 
For  any  one  w^ho  is  not  con- 
vinced that  those  ancient  though 
occasionally  reconciled  adversaries. 
Art  and  Ethics,  are  necessarily  an- 
tipodal, such  a  task,  it  must  be 
confessed,  is  not  one  to  be  ap- 
proached in  a  jaunty  or  easeful 
spirit,  for  it  means  that  one  must 

be    willing,    apparently,    to     enter 
69 


ASPECTS    OF 

the  lists  ranged  with  the  hypo- 
crites, the  prudes,  the  short-sighted 
and  the  unwise;  with  frenzied 
and  myopic  champions  of  respect- 
ability ;  with  all  those  who  are 
as  inflexible  in  their  allegiance  to 
the  moralities  as  they  are  resource- 
ful and  tireless  in  their  pursuit  of  im- 
pudicity  in  art.  Yet  that  there  are 
two  standpoints  from  which  this  ex- 
traordinary work  must  be  regarded 
by  any  candid  observer  I  do  not 
think  is  open  to  question :  it  has  its 
purely  esthetic  aspect,  and  its — I 
shall  not  say  moral,  but  social  —  as- 
pect. To  separate  them  in  any  con- 
scientious discussion  is  impossible. 
70 


MODERN   OPERA 

Let  us,  to  begin  with,  consider, 
in  and  by  itself,  the  quality  of  the 
music  which  the  incomparable 
Strauss  —  Strauss,  the  most  conquer- 
ing  musical  personality  since 
Wagner  —  has  conceived  as  a  fit  em- 
bodiment in  tones  of  the  tragic  and 
maleficent  and  haunting  tale  of  the 
Dancing  Daughter  of  Herodias  and 
her  part  in  the  career  of  the  prophet 
John,  as  recounted  —  with  non- 
Scriptural  variations — by  Oscar 
Wilde.  We  may  consider,  first, 
whether  or  not  it  achieves  the  prime 
requisite  of  music  in  its  organic  re- 
lation to  a  dramatic  subject :  an  en- 
forcement and  heightening  of  the 
7J 


ASPECTS   OF 

effect  of  the  play  ;  setting  aside,  for 
the  present,  those  other  aspects  of  it 
which  have  so  absorbed  critical  at- 
tention, and  of  which  we  have  heard 
overmuch  :  its  remorseless  complex- 
ity, its  unflagging  ingenuity,  its  su- 
perb and  miraculous  orchestration. 
These  are  matters  of  importance, 
but  of  secondary  importance.  The 
point  at  issue  is,  has  Strauss,  through 
his  music,  intensified  and  italicised 
the  moods  and  situations  of  the 
drama ;  and,  secondly,  has  he 
achieved  this  end  through  music 
which  is  in  itself  notable  and  im- 
portant ? 

Never  was  music  so  avid  in  its 
72 


MODERN    OPERA 

search  for  the  eloquent  word  as  is 
the  music  of  Strauss  in  this  work. 
We  are  amazed  at  the  audacity, 
the  resourcefulness,  of  the  express- 
ional  apparatus  that  is  cumulatively- 
reared  in  this  unprecedented  score. 
The  alphabet  of  music  is  ran- 
sacked for  new  and  undreamt-of 
combinations  of  tone:  never  were 
effects  so  elaborate,  so  cunning,  so 
fertilely  contrived,  offered  to  the 
ears  of  men  since  the  voice  of 
music  was  heard  in  its  pristine  estate. 
This  score  challenges  the  music  of 
the  days  that  shall  follow  after  it. 
For  the  most  part,  the  atmosphere 
of  horror,  of  ominous  suspense,  of 
73 


ASPECTS   OF 

oppressive  and  bodeful  gloom,  in 
which  the  tragedy  of  Wilde  is  en- 
wrapped, is  wonderfully  rendered 
in  the  music.  There  are  beyond 
question  overmastering  pages  in  the 
score  —  music  which  has  the  kind 
of  superb  audacity  and  power  of 
effect  that  Dr.  Johnson  discerned 
in  the  style  of  Sir  Thomas  Browne : 
"forcible  expressions  which  he 
would  never  have  used  but  by  ven- 
turing to  the  utmost  verge  of  pro- 
priety; and  flights  which  would 
never  have  been  reached  but  by 
one  who  had  very  little  fear  of  the 
shame  of  falling.''  Of  such  qual- 
ity is  the  passage  which  portrays 
74 


MODERN    OPERA 

the  agonised  suspense  of  Salome 
during  the  beheading  of  yohn ;  the 
passage,  titanic  in  its  expression  of 
malignly  exultant  triumph,  which 
accentuates  the  delivery  of  the  head 
to  the  insensate  princess ;  the  few 
measures  before  Herod's  patibulary 
order  at  the  close  :  these  things  are 
products  of  genius,  of  the  same 
order  of  genius  which  impelled  the 
music  of  "  Don  Quixote,*'  of"  Ein 
Heldenleben,'*  of  "  Zarathustra  ''  ; 
they  are  true  and  vital  in  imagina- 
tion, marvellous  in  intensity  of  vis- 
ion, of  great  and  subduing  potency 
as  dramatic  enforcement  and  as 
sheer  music. 

75 


ASPECTS    OF 

But  when  one  has  said  that  much, 
one  comes  face  to  face  with  the 
chief  weakness  of  the  score  —  its 
failure  in  the  expression  of  the  gov- 
erning motive  of  the  play :  the 
consuming  and  inappeasable  lust  of 
Salome  for  the  white  body  and 
scarlet  lips  of  John, 

"  Neither  the  floods  nor  the  great 
waters  can  quench  my  passion.  I 
was  a  princess,  and  thou  didst  scorn 
me.  I  was  a  virgin,  and  thou  didst 
take  my  virginity  from  me.  I  was 
chaste  and  thou  didst  fill  my  veins 
with  fire.  .  .  .  Ah !  ah  !  wherefore 
didst  thou  not  look  at  me,  Jo- 
kanaan  ?  .  .  . " 

That  is  the  note  which  is  sounded 
76 


MODERN    OPERA 

from  beginning  to  end  of  the  play  — 
that  is  its  focal  emotion.  And 
Strauss  has  not  made  it  sound,  as  it 
should  sound,  in  his  music.  When 
it  should  be  wildly,  barbarically, 
ungovernably  erotic,  as  for  the  en- 
forcement of  Salome's  fervid  suppli- 
cations in  her  first  interview  with 
John^  the  music  is  merely  conven- 
tional in  its  sensuousness.  It  should 
here  be  febrile,  vertiginous.  But 
what,  actually,  do  we  get?  We 
get  a  scene  built  upon  a  phrase  in 
which  is  crystallised  the  desire  of 
Salome  for  the  lips  of  the  Prophet ; 
and  this  theme  is  saccharinely  ar- 
dent and  sentimental,  rather  than 
11 


ASPECTS    OF 

feverish  and  unbridled;  a  phrase 
which  might  have  been  a  product 
of  the  amiably  voluptuous  inspira- 
tion of  the  composer  of  "  Faust." 
The  "Tannhauser"  Bacchanale, 
even  in  its  original  form,  is  more 
truly  expressive  of  venereous  a- 
bandon  than  is  this  strangely  senti- 
mentalised music.  It  has,  no  doubt, 
a  certain  effectiveness,  a  certain  ex- 
pressiveness ;  but  the  effect  that  is 
produced,  and  the  emotion  that  is 
expressed,  are  far  removed  from 
the  field  of  sensation  inhabited  by 
Wilde's  remarkable  Princess.  Yet 
it  would  seem  to  be  a  point  needing 

but  the  lightest  emphasis  that  if  the 

78 


MODERN   OPERA 

passion  of  Salome  is  not  fitly  and  elo- 
quently rendered  by  the  music,  the 
cardinal  impulse,  the  very  heart  of 
Wilde's  drama,  is  left  unexpressed. 
So  it  is  in  the  music  of  the  final 
scene,  Salome's  mad  apostrophe  to 
the  severed  head.  Here  we  get,  not 
the  note  of  lustful  abandonment 
w^hich  would  alone  remove  Salome's 
horrible  appetite  from  the  region 
of  the  perverted  and  the  incredi- 
ble, but  a  kind  of  musical  utterance 
which  simulates  the  noble  rapture  of 
Wagner's  dying  Isolde.  The  dis- 
crepancy of  the  music  in  this  regard 
has  been  recognised  by  those  who 

praise    most  warmly  Strauss'  score. 

79 


ASPECTS   OF 

It  has  been  said  in  extenuation,  on 
the  one  hand,  that  music  is  inca- 
pable of  expressing  what  are  called 
**  base  *'  emotions,  and,  on  the  other 
hand,  that  Strauss  wished  to  exalt, 
to  idealise  and  transfigure,  this 
scene.  To  the  first  objection  it 
may  be  said  simply  that  it  is  based 
upon  an  argument  that  is  at  least 
open  to  serious  question.  It  is  by 
no  means  an  evident  or  settled  truth 
that  music  is  incapable  of  uttering 
anything  but  worthy  emotions, 
ideas,  concepts.  There  is  music 
by  Berlioz,  by  Liszt,  by  Wagner, 
by    Rimsky-Korsakoff,    by    Strauss 

himself,  which  is,   in  its  emotional 
80 


MODERN    OPERA 

substance,  sinister,  demonic,  even 
pornographic  in  suggestion ;  and  not 
simply  by  reason  of  a  key  furnished 
by  text,  motto,  or  dramatic  subject, 
but  in  itself — in  its  quality  and 
character  as  music.  But  the  claim 
need  not  be  elaborated,  or  even 
demonstrated,  since  it  is  beside  the 
point.  One  quarrels  with  the  music 
of  the  final  scene  of  ** Salome''  on 
the  broad  ground  of  its  inappropri- 
ateness  :  because  the  emotional  note 
which  it  strikes  and  sustains  is  one 
of  nobility,  whereas  the  plain  re- 
quirement of  the  scene,  of  the 
psychological     moment,     demands 

music  that  should  be  anything  but 
6  8i 


ASPECTS    OF 

noble.  And  here  we  encounter  the 
objections  of  those  who  hold  that 
Salome  herself,  at  the  moment 
of  her  apostrophe  to  the  dead 
head,  becomes  transfigured,  uplifted 
through  the  power  of  a  great  and 
purifying  love.  But  to  argue  in 
this  manner  is  to  indulge  in  a  par- 
ticularly egregious  kind  of  fatuity. 
To  conceive  Wilde's  lubricious 
princess  as  a  kind  of  Oriental  Isolde 
is  grotesquely  to  distort  the  vivid 
and  wholly  consistent  woman  of 
his  imagining ;  and  it  is  to  re- 
nounce at  once  all  possibility  of  jus- 
tifying her  culminating  actions.  For 

the    only    ground    upon  which    it 
82 


MODERN   OPERA 

might  be  remotely  possible  to  ac- 
count for  Salome' s  remarkable  behav- 
iour, except  by  regarding  her  as  a 
necrophilistic  maniac,  is  that  sup- 
plied by  the  conditions  and  the  envi- 
ronment of  a  lustful,  decadent,  and 
bloodshot  age.  Only  when  one 
conceives  her  as  frankly  and  sponta- 
neously a  barbarian,  nourished  on 
blood  and  lechery,  does  she  become 
at  all  comprehensible  to  others 
than  pathologists,  even  if  she  does 
not  cease  to  impress  us  as  noisome, 
monstrous,  and  horrible. 

The  music  of  "Salome,''  then, 
judging  it  in  its  entirety,  is  deficient 
as  an    exposition,   as  a    translation 
83 


ASPECTS    OF 

into  tone,  of  the  drama  upon  which 
it  is  based ;  for  it  is  inadequate  in  its 
expression  of  the  play's  central  and 
informing  emotion.  One  listens 
to  this  music,  it  must  be  granted, 
with  the  nerves  in  an  excessive  state 
of  tension  —  it  is  enormously  excit- 
ing ;  but  so  is,  under  certain  condi- 
tions, a  determined  beating  upon  a 
drum.  An  assault  upon  the  nerve- 
centres  is  a  vastly  different  thing 
from  an  emotional  persuasion  ;  yet 
there  are  many  who,  in  listening  to 
"Salome,'*  will  need  to  be  con- 
vinced of  it. 

It  would  be  absurd  to  deny,  of 

course,  that  "Salome"  is  in  many 
84 


MODERN    OPERA 

ways  a  noteworthy  and  brilliant  — 
and,  for  the  curious  student  of 
musical  evolution  —  a  fascinating 
work.  Its  musicianship  —  the  sheer 
technical  artistry  which  contrived 
it  —  is  stupefying  in  its  enormous 
and  inerrant  mastery.  The  quality 
of  its  inspiration  and  its  success 
as  a  musico-dramatic  commentary, 
which  have  been  the  prime  consid- 
erations in  this  discussion,  have  been 
measured,  of  course,  by  the  most 
exacting  standards  —  by  the  stand- 
ards set  in  other  and  greater  works 
of  Strauss,  in  comparison  with 
which  it  is  lamentably  inferior  in 

vitality,  sincerity,  and  importance. 
85 


ASPECTS   OF 

In  at  least  one  respect,  however,  it 
compels  the  most  unreserved  praise ; 
and  that  is  in  the  case  of  its  super- 
lative orchestration.  Strauss  has 
written  here  for  a  huge  and  compli- 
cated body  of  instruments,  and  he 
has  set  them  an  appalling  task. 
Never  in  the  history  of  music 
has  such  instrumentation  found  its 
way  onto  the  printed  page.  Yet, 
though  he  requires  his  performers 
to  do  impossible  things,  they  never 
fail  to  contribute  to  the  effect  of 
the  music  as  a  whole  ;  for  the  domi- 
nant and  wonderful  distinction  of 
the    scoring    lies  precisely    in    the 

splendour  of  its  total  effect,  and  the 
86 


MODERN    OPERA 

almost  uncanny  art  with  which  it  is 
accomplished.  One  finds  upon 
every  page  not  only  new  and  super- 
lative achievements  in  colouring, 
unimagined  sonorities,  but  a  keenly 
poetic  feeling  for  the  timbre  which 
will  most  intensify  the  dramatic 
moment.  The  instrumentation, 
from  beginning  to  end,  is  a  gor- 
geous fabric  of  strange  and  novel 
and  obsessing  colours  —  for  in  such 
orchestral  writing  as  this,  sound  be- 
comes colour,  and  colour  sound :  it 
is  not  a  single  sense  which  is  en- 
gaged, but  a  subtle  and  indescribable 
complex  of  all  the  senses ;   one  not 

only  hears,  one  also  imagines  that 
«7 


ASPECTS    OF 

one  sees  and  feels  these  tones,  and 
is  even  fantastically  aware  of  their 
possessing  exotic  and  curious  odours, 
vague  and  singular  perfumes.  It  is 
w^hen  one  turns  from  the  bewilder- 
ing magnificence  of  its  orchestral 
surfaces  to  a  consideration  of  the 
actual  substance  of  the  music,  the 
fundamental  ideas  which  lie  within 
the  dazzling  instrumental  envelope, 
that  it  is  possible  to  realise  why, 
for  many  of  his  most  determined 
admirers,  this  work  marks  a  pathetic 
decline  from  the  standard  set  by 
Strauss  in  his  former  achievements. 
The  indisputable  splendour  of  this 
music,     its    marvellous     witchery, 

88 


MODERN    OPERA 

are  incurably  external.  It  is  a  gor- 
geous and  many-hued  garment,  but 
that  which  it  clothes  and  glorifies 
is  a  poor  and  unnurtured  thing. 
There  is  little  vitality,  little  true 
substance,  within  this  dazzling  in- 
strumental envelope ;  and  for  any 
one  who  is  not  content  with  its 
brave  exterior  panoply,  and  who 
seeks  a  more  permanent  and  living 
beauty  within,  the  thing  seems  but 
a  vast  and  empty  husk.  It  is  not 
that  the  music  is  at  times  ca- 
cophonous in  the  extreme,  that  its 
ugliness  ranges  from  that  which  is 
merely  harsh  and  unlovely  to  that 

which  is  brutally  and   deliberately 
89 


ASPECTS   OF 

hideous ;  for  we  have  not  to  learn 
anew,  in  these  days  of  post- Wagne- 
rian emancipation,  that  a  dramatic 
exigency  justifies  any  possible  musi- 
cal means  that  will  appropriately 
express  it :  to-day  we  cheerfully 
concede  that,  when  a  character  in 
music-drama  tells  another  character 
that  his  body  is  **  like  the  body  of  a 
leper,  like  a  plastered  wall  where 
vipers  crawl  .  .  .  like  a  whitened 
sepulchre,  full  of  loathsome  things," 
the  sentiment  may  not  be  uttered  in 
music  of  Mendelssohnian  sweetness 
and  placidity.  It  is  because  the 
music  is  so  often  vulgarly  senti- 
mental, when  it  should  be  terrible 
90 


MODERN    OPERA 

and  unbridled  in  its  passion,  that  it 
seems  to  some  a  defective  perform- 
ance. For  sheer  commonness,  allied 
with  a  kind  of  emotionalism  that  is 
the  worse  for  being  inflated  in  ex- 
pression, it  would  be  hard  to  find,  in 
any  score  of  the  rank  of  "  Salome," 
the  equal  of  the  two  themes  which 
Strauss  uses  so  extensively  that  they 
stand  almost  as  the  dominant  mo- 
tives in  the  score :  the  theme  which 
is  associated  with  Salome's  desire 
to  kiss  the  lips  of  ^ohriy  and  that 
other  theme  —  it  has  been  called 
that  of  "  Ecstasy ''  —  which  begins 
like  the  cantabile  subject  in  the  first 

movement  of  Tschaikowsky's  "  Pa- 
91 


ASPECTS    OF 

thetic  "  Symphony,  and  ends  — well, 
like  Strauss  at  his  worst. 

An  astounding  score  !  —  music 
that  is  by  turns  gorgeous,  banal, 
delicate,  cataclysmic,  vulgar,  senti- 
mental, insinuating,  tornadic :  music 
which  is  as  inexplicable  in 
its  shortcomings  as  it  is  over- 
whelming in  its  occasional  tri- 
umphs. 

We  may  now  consider  that  other 
aspect  from  which,  I  have  said,  the 
candid  observer  is  compelled  to 
regard  this  remarkable  work. 

Those  over-zealous  friends  of 
Strauss  who  have  sought  to  justify 
the  ofFensiveness  of  "  Salome  *'  by 
92 


MODERN    OPERA 

alleging  the  case  of  Wagner's  "  Die 
Walkure/'  and  the  relationship  that 
is  there  shown  to  exist  between  the 
ill-starred  Volsungs,  are  worse  than 
misguided;  for  however  unhal- 
lowed that  relationship  may  be,  it 
conveys  no  hint  of  sexual  malaise. 
Siegmund  and  Sieglinde  are  superbly 
healthful  and  untainted  animals: 
to  name  their  exuberant  passion 
in  the  same  breath  with  the  hor- 
rible lust  of  Salome  is  stupid  and 
absurd. 

Let  us   not    confuse    the    issue: 

The  spectacle  of  a  woman  fondling 

passionately  a  severed  and  reeking 

head    and    puling    over    its    dead 

93 


ASPECTS    OF 

lips,  is  not  necessarily  delete- 
rious to  morals,  nor  is  it  neces- 
sarily an  act  of  impudicity ;  it  is 
merely,  for  those  whose  calling 
does  not  happen  to  induce  famil- 
iarity with  mortuary  things,  horrible 
and  revolting.  No  matter  how, 
in  practice  on  the  stage,  the  thing 
may  be  ameliorated,  the  fact, — the 
situation  as  conceived  and  ordered 
by  the  dramatist,  —  is  inescapable. 
It  has  been  said  that  this  scene  is 
not  really  so  sickening  as  it  is 
alleged  to  be,  since  the  stage 
directions  require  that  Salome  s 
kisses  be  bestowed  in  the  obscurity 

of  a  darkened  stage.     But  to  that  it 
94 


MODERN    OPERA 

may  be  replied,  in  the  first  place, 
that  darkness  does  little  to  mitigate 
the  horror  of  the  scene  as  conveyed 
by  the  words  of  Salome  —  so  little, 
in  fact,  that  Herod,  who  was  any- 
thing but  a  person  of  fastidious 
sensibilities,  is  overcome  with 
loathing  and  commands  her  de- 
spatch; and,  secondly,  that  the 
stage  directions  expressly  declare 
for  an  illumination  of  the  scene 
by  a  "  moonbeam  "...  which 
"  covers  her  with  light,"  just  be- 
fore the  end,  while  she  is  at  the 
climax  of  her   ghastly   libido, 

Mr.    Ernest   Newman,   a    thor- 
oughly   sane    and  extremely    able 
95 


ASPECTS    OF 

champion  of  all  that  is  best  in 
Strauss,  has  said,  in  considering 
this  aspect  of  "  Salome,"  that  **  the 
whole  outcry  against  it  comes  from 
a  number  of  too  excitable  people 
who  are  not  artists,  and  who  there- 
fore cannot  understand  the  attitude 
of  the  artist  towards  work  of  this 
kind.  Human  nature,''  he  goes 
on,  **  breaks  out  into  a  variety  of 
forms  of  energy  that  are  not  at  all 
nice  from  the  moral  point  of  view 
—  murder,  for  example,  or  forgery, 
or  the  struggle  of  the  ambitious 
politician  for  power,  or  the  desire 
to  get  rich  quickly  at  other  people's 

expense.     But  because  these  things 
96 


MODERN    OPERA 

are  objectionable  in  themselves  and 
dangerous  to  social  well-being  there 
is  no  reason  why  the  artist  should 
not  interest  us  in  them  by  the 
genius  with  which  he  describes 
them.  Stevenson's  Dr.  Jekyll-Mr. 
Hyde  was  a  dangerous  person 
whom,  in  real  life,  we  should  want 
the  police  to  lay  by  the  heels ;  but 
sensible  people  who  read  the  story 
do  not  bristle  with  indignation  at 
Stevenson  for  creating  such  a  char- 
acter; they  simply  enjoy  the  art  of 
it.  The  writing  of  the  story  did 
not  turn  Stevenson  into  a  monster 
of  deception  and  cruelty,  nor  does 

the  reading  of  it  have  that  effect 
7  97 


ASPECTS    OF 

on  us.  Things  are  different  in  art 
from  what  the  same  things  would 
be  in  real  life,  and  an  artist's  joy  in 
the  depiction  of  some  dreadful  phase 
of  human  nature  does  not  neces- 
sarily mean  that,  as  a  private  in- 
dividual, he  is  depraved,  or  that 
the  spectacle  of  his  art  will  make 
for  depravity  in  the  audience.  Now 
Wilde  and  Strauss  have  simply  drawn 
an  erotic  and  half-deranged  Oriental 
woman  as  they  imagine  she  may 
have  been.  They  do  not  recom- 
mend her ;  they  simply  present  her, 
as  a  specimen  of  what  human 
nature  can  be  like  in  certain  cir- 
cumstances. .  .  .  The  hysterical 
98 


MODERN    OPERA 

moralists  who  cry  out  against 
*  Salome '  .  •  .  have  a  terrified,  if 
rather  incoherent,  feeUng  that  if 
women  in  general  were  suddenly  to 
become  abnormally  morbid,  con- 
ceive perverse  passions  for  bishops, 
have  these  holy  men  decapitated 
when  their  advances  were  rejected, 
and  then  start  kissing  the  severed 
heads  in  a  blind  fury  of  love  and 
revenge  in  the  middle  of  the  draw- 
ing-room, the  respectable  ^^40  a 
year  householder  would  feel  the 
earth  rocking  beneath  his  feet.  But 
women  are  not  going  to  do  these 
spicy  things   simply    because    they 

saw  Salome  on  the  stage  do  some- 
99 


ASPECTS    OF 

thing  like  them,  any  more  than 
men  are  going  to  walk  over  the 
bodies  of  little  children  because 
they  read  that  Mr.  Hyde  did  so,  or 
murder  their  brothers  because  Ham- 
let's uncle  murdered  his/' 

Now  that,  of  course,  is  iresist- 
ible.  But  Mr.  Newman's  gift  of  vi- 
vacious and  telling  statement,  and 
his  natural  impatience  with  the  cant 
of  those  who  hold  briefs  for  a  facile 
morality,  have  here  led  him,  as  it 
seems  to  me,  astray.  To  deny  that 
an  intimate  and  vital  relationship 
exists  between  the  subject  chosen 
by  an  artist  and  its  probable  effect 
upon    the   public    is    to  yield    the 

lOO 


MODERN    OPERA 

whole  case  to  those  who  hold  that 
this  relationship,  in  the  case  of  the 
theatre  (and,  of  course,  the  opera 
house),  is  merely  casual  and  incon- 
sequential :  it  is  to  yield  it  to  the 
upholder  of  the  stage  as  an  agent  of 
"relaxation,*'  an  agent  either  of 
mere  entertainment  or  mere  sensa- 
tion. It  is  not  unlikely  that  Mr. 
Newman  would  be  the  first  to  admit 
that,  if  the  prime  function  of  art 
can  be  postulated  at  all,  it  might 
be  conceived  to  be  that  of  enlarging 
the  sense  of  life :  as  an  agency  for 
liberating  and  mellowing  the  spirit : 
as  an  instrument  primarily  quicken- 
ing and  emancipative.      "The  sad- 


lOI 


ASPECTS   OF 

ness  of  life  is  the  joy  of  art,"  said 
Mr.  George  Moore.  The  sadness 
of  life,  yes  ;  and  the  evil  and  tragedy, 
the  terror  and  violence,  of  life :  for 
the  contemplation  of  these  may, 
through  the  evoking  of  pity,  nour- 
ish and  enlarge  the  spirit  of  the 
beholder.  But  are  we  very  greatly 
nourished  by  the  contemplation  of 
that  which  must  inevitably  arouse 
disgust  rather  than  compassion  ?  I 
do  not  speak  of  "morality"  or 
"  immorality,"  since  there  is  noth- 
ing stable  in  the  use  or  understand- 
ing  of  these  terms.  But  those 
aspects  of  life  which  sicken  the 
sense,  which  are  loathsome  rather 

I02 


MODERN    OPERA 

than  terrible  —  are  they  fit  matter 
for  the  artist  ? 

It  is  a  much  mauled  and  much 
tortured  point,  and  I,  for  one,  am 
not  unwilling  to  leave  the  matter 
in  the  condition  in  which  Dr.  John- 
son left  the  subject  of  a  future  state, 
concerning  which  a  certain  lady 
was  interrogating  him.  "She 
seemed,*'  recounts  the  admirable 
Boswell, "  desirous  of  knowing  more, 
but  he  left  the  matter  in  obscurity." 

To  return,  in  conclusion,  to 
Strauss  the  musician :  Where,  one 
ends  by  wondering,  is  the  earlier, 
the  greater,  Strauss?  —  the  unpar- 
alleled maker  of  music,  the  indis- 
103 


ASPECTS    OF 

putable  genius  who  gave  us  a  sheaf 

of  masterpieces:  who  gave  us  "  Don 

Quixote/'    "Ein    Heldenleben," 

"  Zarathustra,"  "Tod  und  Verkla- 

rung."     Has    he    passed  into  that 

desolate  region  occupied  in  his  day 

by    Hector    Berlioz,  for    whom   a 

sense  of  the  tragic  futility  of  talent 

without  genius  did  not  exist  —  the 

futility  of  application,  of  ingenuity, 

of  constructive    resource,    without 

that    ultimate    and    unpredictable 

flame?     Is   not    Strauss,    in   such 

a  work  as  **  Salome,"  but  another 

Berlioz   (though  a    Berlioz  with  a 

gleaming  past)  ?     Is  he  not  here  as 

one  disdainfully   indifferent  to  the 
104 


MODERN    OPERA 

ministrations  of  that  "Eternal 
Spirit  '*  which,  in  Milton's  wonder- 
ful phrase,  "  sends  out  his  Seraphim 
with  the  hallowed  fire  of  his  altar, 
to  touch  and  purify  the  lips  of 
whom  he  pleases  ''  ? 


105 


A   PERFECT   MUSIC-DRAMA 


A   PERFECT   MUSIC-DRAMA 

I 

Somewhat  less  than  a  century  ago 
William  Hazlitt,  whose  contempt 
for  opera  as  a  form  of  art  was  gen- 
uine and  profound,  observed  amiably 
that  the  "Opera  Muse''  was  "not 
a  beautiful  virgin,  who  can  hope  to 
charm  by  simplicity  and  sensibility, 
but  a  tawdry  courtesan,  who,  when 
her  paint  and  patches,  her  rings 
and  jewels  are  stripped  off,  can 
excite    only  disgust  and    ridicule." 

It    may   be  conceded  that  matters 

109 


ASPECTS   OF 

have  improved  somewhat  since 
that  receding  day  when  Hazlitt, 
whose  critical  forte  was  not  ur- 
banity, uttered  this  acrimonious 
opinion.  The  opera  is  doubtless 
still,  as  it  was  in  his  day,  ideally  and 
exquisitely  contrived  "  to  amuse  or 
stimulate  the  intellectual  languor  of 
those  classes  of  society  on  whose  sup- 
port it  immediately  depends."  Yet 
the  shade  of  Hazlitt  might  have  been 
made  sufficiently  uncomfortable  by 
being  confronted,  half  a  century 
after  his  death,  by  the  indignant 
and  voluble  apparition  of  Richard 
Wagner.    To  tell  the  truth,  though, 

Wagner  is  scarcely  the  opera-maker 
no 


MODERN    OPERA 

with  whose  example  one  might 
to-day  most  effectually  rebuke  the 
contempt  of  Hazlitt.  While  the 
Muse  which  presided  at  the  birth 
of  the  Wagnerian  music-drama  can 
certainly  not  be  conceived  as  **  a 
tawdry  courtesan,'*  neither  can  she 
be  conceived  as  precisely  virginal, 
persuasive  by  reason  of  her  "  sim- 
plicity'' and  **  sensibility/'  Wag- 
ner, for  all  his  dramatic  instinct, 
was,  as  we  are  growing  to  see,  as 
avid  of  musical  effect,  achieved  by 
whatever  defiance  of  dramatic  con- 
sistency, as  was  any  one  of  the  other 
facile  and  conscienceless  opera- 
wrights  whom  his  doctrines    con- 


ASPECTS   OF 

temned.  The  ultimate  difference 
between  him  and  them,  aside  from 
any  questions  of  motive,  principle, 
or  method,  is  simply  that  he  was  a 
transcendent  genius  who  wrote 
music  of  superlative  beauty  and 
power,  whereas  they  were,  com- 
paratively speaking,  Lilliputians. 

Mr.  William  F.  Apthorp,  speak- 
ing of  the  condition  of  the  Opera 
before  Wagner's  reforms  were  ex- 
erted upon  it,  observes  that  it 
"  remained  (despite  the  efforts  of 
Gluck)  virtually  what  Cesti  had 
made  it  —  not  a  drama  with  aux- 
iliary music,  but  a  dramma  per 
music  a  —  a  drama  for  (the  sake  of) 


112 


MODERN    OPERA 

music."  Now  it  was,  of  course, 
the  passionate  aim  of  Wagner  to 
write  music-dramas  which  should 
be  dramas  with  auxiHary  music, 
rather  than  dramas  for  the  sake  of 
music ;  yet  it  is  becoming  more  and 
more  obvious  that  what  he  actually 
succeeded  in  producing,  despite 
himself,  were  dramas  which  we 
tolerate  to-day  only  because  of  their 
transfiguring  and  paramount  music. 
In  view  of  recent  developments  in 
the  modern  lyric-drama  which  have 
resulted  from  both  his  theories  and 
his  practice,  it  may  not  be  without 
avail  to  review  certain  aspects  of 
his  art  in  the  perspective  afforded 

8  113 


n 


ASPECTS    OF 

by  the  quarter-century  which  now 
stretches  lengtheningly  between 
ourselves  and  him. 

II 

It  is,  of  course,  a  truism  to  say 

that  the  corner-stone  of  Wagner's 

doctrinal  arch  was  that  music  in  the 

opera    had    usurped   a   position    of 

pre-eminence  to  which  it  was  not 

entitled,  and  which  was  not  to  be 

tolerated  in  what  he  conceived  to 

be    the    ideal    music-drama.     He 

conceived    the    true    function   of 

music  in  its  alliance  with  drama  to 

be  strictly  auxiliary  —  an  aid,  and 

nothing   more  than  an  aid,  to  the 
114 


MODERN    OPERA 

enforcement,  the  driving  home,  of 
the  play.  As  Mr.  Apthorp  has 
excellently  stated  it,  his  basic  prin- 
ciple was  that  "  the  text  (what  in 
old-fashioned  dialect  was  called  the 
libretto)  once  written  by  the  poet, 
all  other  persons  who  have  to  do 
with  the  work  —  composer,  stage- 
architect,  scene-painter,  costumer, 
stage-manager,  conductor  and  sing- 
ing actors  —  should  aim  at  one 
thing  only  :  the  most  exact,  perfect, 
and  lifelike  embodiment  of  the 
poet's  thought.''  Wagner's  chief 
quarrel  with  the  opera  as  he  found 
it  was  with  the   preponderance  of 

the  musical  element  in  its  constitu- 
"5 


ASPECTS   OF 

tion.  If  there  is  one  principle  that 
is  definite,  positive,  and  unmistak- 
able in  his  theoretical  position  it  is 
that,  in  the  evolution  of  a  true 
music-drama,  the  dramatist  should 
be  the  controlling,  the  composer 
an  accessory,  factor — like  the  scene- 
painter  and  the  costumer,  ancillary 
and  contributive.  If  it  can  be 
shown  that  in  the  actual  result  of 
his  practice  this  relationship  be- 
tween the  drama  and  the  music  is 
inverted  —  that  in  his  music-dramas 
the  music  is  supreme,  both  in  its 
artistic  quality  and  in  its  effect, 
while  the  drama  is  a  mere  frame- 
work for  its  splendours — it  becomes 
ii6 


MODERN    OPERA 

obvious  that  he  failed  (gloriously, 
no  doubt,  but  still  definitively)  in 
what  he  set  out  to  achieve.  It  was 
his  dearest  principle  that,  in  Mr. 
Apthorp's  words,  "in  any  sort  of 
drama,  musical  or  otherwise,  the 
play  's  the  thing/'  Yet  what  be- 
comes of  "  Tristan  und  Isolde,*'  of 
"Meistersinger,''  of  "  Gotterdam- 
merung,*'  when  this  principle  is 
tested  by  their  quality  and  effect  ? 
Would  even  the  most  incorruptible 
among  the  Wagnerites  of  a  quarter 
of  a  century  ago,  in  the  most  ex- 
alted hour  of  martyrdom,  have  ven- 
tured to  say  that  in  "  Tristan,"  for 

example,  the  play  's  the  thing  ?   Im- 
<I7 


ASPECTS   OF 

agine  what  the  second  act,  say, 
divorced  from  the  music,  would  be 
like  ;  and  then  remember  that  the 
music  of  this  act,  with  the  voice- 
parts  given  to  various  instruments, 
might,  with  a  little  adjustment  and 
condensation,  be  performed  as  a 
somewhat  raggedly  constructed 
symphonic  poem.  The  test  is  a 
rough  and  partial  one,  no  doubt, 
and  it  is  subject  to  many  modifica- 
tions and  reservations.  It  is  not  to 
be  disputed,  of  course,  that  here  is 
music  which  is  always  and  every- 
where transfused  with  dramatic 
emotion,  and  that  its  form  is  dra- 
matic form  and  not  musical  form ; 

ii8 


MODERN   OPERA 

but  is  there  to-day  a  doubt  in  the 
mind  of  any  candid  student  of  Wag- 
ner as  to  the  element  in  this  musico- 
dramatic  compound  which  is  par- 
amount  and     controlling  ? 

It  should  be  remembered  that 
what  Wagner  thought  he  was  ac- 
complishing, or  imagined  he  had 
accomplished,  is  not  in  question. 
He  conceived  himself  to  be  prima- 
rily a  dramatist,  a  dramatist  using 
music  solely  and  frankly  as  an  aux- 
iliary, as  a  means  of  intensifying  the 
action  and  the  moods  of  the  play ; 
and  this  end  he  pathetically  imag- 
ined that  he  had  achieved.  Yet  it 
is  becoming  more  and  more  gener- 


ASPECTS   OF 

ally  recognised  and  admitted,  by 
the  sincerest  appreciators  of  his  art, 
that  as  a  dramatist  he  was  insignif- 
icant and  inferior.  Had  any 
temerarious  soul  assured  him  that 
his  dramas  would  survive  and  endure 
by  virtue  of  their  music  alone,  it  is 
easy  to  fancy  his  mingled  incredu- 
ilty  and  anger.  He  was  not,  judged 
by  an  ideal  even  less  uncompromis- 
ing than  his  own,  a  musical  dramatist 
at  all.  It  is  merely  asserting  a  truth 
which  has  already  found  recognition 
to  insist  that  he  was  essentially  a 
dramatic  symphonist,  a  writer  of 
programme-music    who     used    the 

drama  and  its  appurtenances,  for  the 
1 20 


MODERN    OPERA 

most  part,  as  a  mere  stalking-horse 
for  his  huge  orchestral  tone-poems. 
He  was  seduced  and  overwhelmed 
by  his  own  marvellous  art,  his  irre- 
pressible eloquence :  his  drama  is 
distorted,  exaggerated,  or  spread  to 
an  arid  thinness,  to  accommodate  his 
imperious  musical  imagination  ;  he 
ruthlessly  interrupts  or  suspends  the 
action  of  his  plays  or  the  dialogue 
of  his  personages  in  order  that  he 
may  meditate  or  philosophise  or- 
chestrally.  He  called  his  operas  by 
the  proud  title  of  "music-dramas'"; 
yet  often  it  is  impossible  to  find  the 
drama  because  of  the  music. 

It  was  not,  as  has  been  said  before, 

121 


ASPECTS   OF 

that  he  fell  short,  but  that  he  went 
too  far;  he  should  have  stopped  at 
eloquent  and_p„omted  intensification. 
Instead,  he  smothered  his  none  too 
lucid  dramas  in  a  welter  of  magnifi- 
cent and  inspired  music — obscured 
them,  stretched  them  to  intolerable 
lengths,  filled  up  every  possible  space 
in  them  with  his  wonderful  tonal 
commentary,  by  which  they  are  not, 
as  he  thought,  upborne,  but  griev- 
ously overweighted.  Mr.,James 
Huneker  has  remarked  that  Wagner 
was  the  first  and  only  Wagnerite. 
As  a  matter  of  sober  fact,  he  was 
one  of  the  most  formidable  antag- 
onists that  Wagnerism  ever  had. 

122 


MODERN   OPERA 

It  appears  likely  that  his  lyric- 
dramas  will  endure  on  the  stage  both 
in  spite  of  and  because  of  their  mu- 
sic. The  validity  and  persuasiveness 
of  "Tristan''  and  the  "Ring''  as 
music-dramas,  as  consistent  and  sym- 
metrical embodiments  of  Wagner's 
ideals,  seems  less  certain  than  of  old. 
But  the  music,  qua  music,  is  of  un- 
dimini>shf;d.„goteiK:j;- —  it  is  still,  re- 
garded as  an  independent  entity,  ,of 
almost  unlimited  scope  in  its  voicing 
of  the  moods  and  emotions  of  men 
and  the  varied  pageant  of  the  visible 
world ;  and  it  will  always  float  and 
sustain  his  dramas  and  make  them 

viable.      Gorgeous    and    exquisite, 
123 


ASPECTS    OF 

epical  and  tender,  sublimely_n<Qble^ 
and  earthly  as  passion  and  despair, 
it  is  still,  at  its  best,  unparalleled 
and  unapproached ;  and,  as  Pater 
prophesied  of  the  poetry  of  Rossetti, 
more  torches  will  be  lit  from 
its  flame  than  even  enthusiasts  im- 
agine. Nothing  can  ever  dim 
the  glory  of  Wagner  the  conjurer 
of  tones.  His  place  is  securely 
among  the  Olympians,  w^here  he 
sits,  one  likes  to  fancy,  apart  — 
a  little  lonely  and  disdainful.  In 
his  music  he  is  almost  always, 
as  Arnold  said  of  the  greatest  of 
the  Elizabethans,, ,"  divinely  strong, 

rich,  and   attractive";   and    at   his 
124 


MODERN    OPERA 

finest  he  is  incomparable.  No  one 
but  a  master  of  transcendent  genius, 
and  the  most  amazingly  varied 
powers  of  expression,  could  have 
conceived  and  shaped  such  perfect 
yet  diverse  things  as  those  three 
matchless  passages  in  which  he  is 
revealed  to  us  as  the  riant  and  ten- 
der humanist,  the  impassioned  ly- 
rist, and  the  apocalyptic  seer:  the 
exquisite  close  of  the  second  act 
of  "Die  Meistersinger,"  where 
is  achieved  a  blend  of  magically 
poetic  tenderness  and  comedy  for 
which  there  are  analogies  only  in 
certain  supreme  moments  in  Shake- 
speare ;  the  tonal  celebration  of  the 
125 


ASPECTS    OF 

ecstatic  swoon  of  Tristan  and  Isolde 
in  the  midst  of  which  the  warning 
voice  of  the  watcher  on  the  tower 
is  borne  across  an  orchestral  flood 
of  ineffable  and  miraculous  beauty  ; 
and  that  last  passage  to  which  this 
wonderful  man  set  his  hand,  the 
culminating  moment  in  the  adora- 
tion of  the  Grail  by  the  transfigured 
Parsifal  —  music  that  is  as  the  chant- 
ing of  seraphs:  in  which  censers 
are  swung  before  celestial  altars. 
Of  the  genius  who  could  contrive 
such  things  as  these,  one  can  say  no 
less  than  that,  regarded  from  any 
aesthetic  standpoint  at  all,  he  is,  as 

the  subtle  appreciator  whom  I  have 
126 


MODERN    OPERA 

quoted  said  of  a  great  though  way- 
ward poet,  **  a  superb  god  of  art,  so 
proudly  heedless  or  reckless  that  he 
never  notices  the  loss  of  his  winged 
sandals,  and  that  he  is  stumbling 
clumsily  when  he  might  well  lightly 
be  lifting  his  steps  against  the  sun- 
way  where  his  eyes  are  set." 

Ill 

As  music-dramas,  then,  appraised 

by  his  own  standard,  the  deficiency 

of   Wagner's    representative  works 

must  be  held  to  be  the  subordination 

of  the  dramatic  element  in  them  to 

a  constituent  part  —  their  music  — 

which  should  be  accessory  and  con- 
127 


ASPECTS    OF 

tributive  rather  than  essential  and 
predominant.  This  tyranny  is  ex- 
ercised chiefly — and,  let  it  be 
cheerfully  owned,  to  the  glory  of 
musical  art  —  through  Wagner's  or- 
chestra :  that  magnificent  vehicle  of 
a  tone-poet  who  was  at  once  its 
master  and  its  slave.  Yet  Wagner 
sinned  scarcely  less  flagrantly  against 
his  most  dearly  held  principles  in 
his  treatment  of  the  voice.  He 
conceived  it  to  be  of  vital  impor- 
tance that  in  the  construction  of 
the  voice-parts  no  merely  musical 
consideration  of  any  kind  should 
be     permitted     to     interfere    with 

the    lucid    utterance   of   the    text. 
128 


MODERN    OPERA 

His  singers  were  to  employ  a 
kind  of  heightened  and  intensified 
speech,  necessarily  musical  in  its 
intervals,  but  never  musical  at  the 
expense  of  truthfully  expressive  dec- 
lamation. Yet  in  some  of  the 
vocal  writing  in  his  later  works  he 
is  false  to  this  principle,  for  he 
not  infrequently  permits  himself  to 
be  ravishingly  lyrical  at  moments 
where  lyricism  is  superfluous  and 
distracting  when  it  is  not  imperti- 
nent. Again  he  is  too  much  the 
musician ;  too  little  the  musical 
dramatist. 

And  herewith  I  come  to  a  curi- 
ous and  interesting  point.     Mr,  E. 
9  129 


ASPECTS   OF 

A.  Baughan,  an  English  critic  of 
authority,  who  has  written  with 
both  courage  and  wisdom  concern- 
ing Wagnerian  theories  and  prac- 
tices, entertains  singular  views  con- 
cerning the  nature  of  music-drama 
as  an  art  form.  "  There  must  be 
no  false  ideas  of  music-drama  be- 
ing drama,''  he  has  asserted:  "it  is 
primarily  music.  The  drama  of  it 
is  merely,"  he  goes  on,  "  the  motive 
force  of  the  whole,  and  technically 
takes  the  place  of  form  in  absolute^ 
music" — a  sentence  which,  one 
may  be  permitted  to  observe,  would 
contain  an  admirably  concise  state- 
ment of  the  truth  if  the  word 
130 


MODERN    OPERA 

^*  merely"  were  left  out.  Mr. 
Baughan  is  led  by  this  belief  to  take 
the  position  that  whereas,  in  one 
respect  Wagner  was,  to  put  it 
briefly,  too  musical,  in  another  re- 
spect he  was  not  musical  enough. 
He  acknowledges  the  fact  that  in 
Wagner's  combination  of  music  and 
drama,  the  music,  so  far  as  the  or- 
chestra is  concerned,  assumes  an 
oppressive  and  obstructive  promi- 
nence; it  indulges  for  the  most 
part,  he  holds,  in  a  "  superheated 
commentary  '*  which  leaves  little  to 
suggestion,  which  is  persistently  ex- 
cessive and  overbearing ;  yet  at  the 

same  time  Mr.  Baughan  holds  that 
131 


ASPECTS   OF 

Wagner,  in    his    treatment    of  the 

voice-parts,    did    not,    as    he    says, 

"  make  use  of  the  full  resources  of 

music  and  of  the  beautiful  human 

singing-voice    in    duets,    concerted 

numbers,  and  choruses/'      It  is  the 

second  of  these  objections    which, 

as  it  seems  to  me,  contains  matter 

for  discussion.     So  far  from  being 

deficient  in  melodious  effectiveness, 

Wagner's  writing  for  the  voice,  I 

would    hold,    errs   upon  the   other 

side.       It    would    be    possible     to 

name    page     after     page     in     the 

"Ring"  and  "Tristan''  which  is 

marred,     from    a    musico-dramatic 

standpoint,   by    an  excess    of    lyri- 
X32 


MODERN    OPERA 

cism.  It  is  a  little  difficult  to 
understand,  for  example,  how  Wag- 
ner would  have  justified  his  ad- 
mission of  the  duet  into  his  care- 
fully reasoned  scheme ;  for  if  the 
ensemble  piece  —  the  quartette  in 
"  Rigoletto,''  for  example  —  is  in- 
herently absurd  from  a  dramatic 
point  of  view,  as  it  incontrovertibly 
is,  so  also  is  the  duet.  Even  the 
most  liberal  attitude  toward  the  con- 
ventions of  the  operatic  stage  makes 
it  difficult  to  tolerate  what  Mr.  W. 
P.  James  describes  as  the  spectacle 
of  two  persons  inside  a  house  and 
two  outside,  supposed  to  be  uncon- 
scious of  each  other's  presence,  mak- 
133 


ASPECTS   OF 

ing  their  remftf4t8-^ia^..xh}zlhinic 
and  harmonic  consonance.  Yet  is 
Wagner  much  less  distant  from  the 
dramatic  verities  when,  in  the  third 
act  of  "  Die  Meigtersinger/'  he 
ranges  JLvje.p£ople  in  the  centre  of 
a  room  and  causes  them  to  soHlo- 
quise  in  concert,  to  the  end  of  pro- 
ducing a  quintette  of  ravishing 
musical  beauty  ?  Had  he  wholly 
freed  himself  from  what  he  re- 
garded as  the  musical  bondage  of 
his  predecessors  when  he  could  tol- 
erate such  obvious  anachronisms  as 
the  duet,  the  ensemble  piece,  and 
the  chorus  ?  The  truth  of  the  mat- 
ter seems  to  be  that  if  Wagner's 
134 


MODERN   OPEPvA 

music,  in  itself,  were  less  wonderful 
and  enthralling  than  it  is,  those  who 
would  fain  insist  upon  a  decent  re- 
gard for  dramatic  consistency  in  the 
lyric-drama  would  not  tolerate  many 
things  in  the  vocal  writing  in 
"Tristan,"  "  Meistersinger,"  the 
"Ring"  and  "Parsifal"  which  are 
not  a  whit  more  dramatically  reason- 
able than  the  absurdities  which 
Wagner  contemptuously  derided  in 
the  operas  of  the  old  school.  His 
vocal  writing,  far  from  being  defi- 
cient in  melodic  quality,  far  from 
ignoring  "  the  full  resources  of 
music  and  of  the  beautiful  singing 
voice,"  is  saturated  and  overflowing 
135 


ASPECTS   OF 

with  musical  beauty,  and  with  al- 
most every  variety  of  melodic  effec- 
tiveness except  that  which  is  pos- 
sible to  purely  formal  song.  Mr. 
Baughan  complains  that  the  voice- 
parts  have  "no  independent  life" 
of  their  own.  **  In  many  cases/' 
he  says,  "  the  vocal  parts,  if  detached 
from  the  score  [from  the  orchestral 
support]  are  without  emotional 
meaning  of  any  kind  —  the  expres- 
sion is  absolutely  incomplete."  An 
astonishing  complaint !  For  the 
same  thing  is  necessarily  true  of 
any  writing  for  the  voice  allied  with 
modern  harmony  in  the  accompani- 
ment. How  many  songs  written 
136 


MODERN    OPERA 

since  composers  began  to  discover 
the  modulatory  capacities  of  har- 
mony, one  might  ask  Mr.  Baughan, 
would  have  "  emotional  meaning," 
or  any  kind  of  expression  or  effect, 
if  the  voice  part  w^ere  sung  without 
its  harmonic  support  ? 

No;  Wagner  cannot  justly  be 
convicted  of  a  paucity  of  melodic 
effect  in  his  writing  for  the  voice. 
He  would,  one  must  venture  to  be- 
lieve, have  come  closer  to  realising 
his  ideal  of  what  a  music-drama 
should  be  if,  in  the  first  place,  he 
had  been  able  and  willing  to  restrain 
the  overwhelming  tide  of  his  or- 
chestral eloquence;  and  if,  in  the 
^37 


ASPECTS   OF 

second  place,  he  had  been  content  to 
let  his  dramatis  personce  employ,  not 
(in  accordance  with  Mr.  Baughan's 
wish)  a  form  of  lyric  speech 
richer  in  purely  musical  elements 
of  effect,  but  one  of  more  nat- 
uralistic contour,  simpler,  more 
direct,  less  ornately  and  intrusively 
melodic  in  its  utterance  of  the 
text. 

It  would  be  fatuous,  of  course,  to 
deny  that  there  are  passages  in  Wag- 
ner's later  music-dramas  to  which 
one  can  point,  by  reason  of  their 
continent  and  transparent  expression 
of  the  dramatic  situation,  as  ex- 
amples of  a  perfect  kind  of  music- 
138 


MODERN   OPERA 

drama:  which  satisfy,  not  only 
every  conceivable  demand  for  full- 
ness of  musical  utterance  (for  that 
Wagner  almost  always  does),  but 
those  intellectual  convictions  as  to 
what  an  ideal  music-drama  should 
be  which  he  himself  was  pre-emi- 
nently instrumental  in  diffusing.  In 
such  passages  his  direct  and  point- 
edly dramatic  use  of  the  voice,  and 
his  discreet  and  sparing,  yet  deeply 
suggestive,  treatment  of  the  orches- 
tral background,  are  of  irresistible 
effect.  How  admirable,  then,  is 
his  restraint !  '  As  in,  for  example, 
Waltrautes  narrative  in  "  Gotter- 
dammerung'' ;  the  early  scenes  be- 
139 


ASPECTS   OF 

tween  Siegmund  and  Sieglinde^  and 

Brunnhilde  s   announcement   of  the 

decree  of  death  to  the  Volsung,  in 

*'Walkure";  and  in  "Tristan''  the 

passage  wherein  the  knight  proffers 

to  Isolde  his  sword ;    the  opening  of 

the  third  act ;  and  the  first  sixteen 

measures  that  follow  the  meeting  of 

the  lovers  in  the  second  act  — -  where 

the  breathless,   almost    inarticulate 

ecstasy  of  the    moment   is   uttered 

with  extraordinary  fidelity,  only  to 

lead  into  a  passage  wherein  the  pair 

suddenly  recover  their  breath  in  time 

to  respond  to  the  need  of   battling 

against    one  of  the    most   glorious 

but  dramatically   inflated   outpour- 
140 


MODERN  OPERA 

ings    of   erotic  rapture  ever  given 
to  an  orchestra. 

But  scenes  of  such  perfect  mu- 
sico-dramatic  adjustment  are  rare  in 
Wagner.  It  is  not  likely,  in  view 
of  his  insuperable  propensity  tov^ard 
musical  rhetoric  and  his  amazingly 
fecund  eloquence,  that,  even  if  he 
had  kept  a  more  sternly  repressive 
hand  upon  his  impulse  tow^ard  mu- 
sical elaboration,  he  could  have 
accomplished  the  union  of  drama 
and  music  in  that  exquisite  and 
scrupulously  balanced  relationship 
which  produces  the  ideal  music- 
drama.      That  achievement  had  to 

wait  until  the  materials  of  musical 
141 


ASPECTS    OF 

expression  had  attained  a  greater 
ductility  and  variety,  and  until  the 
intellectual  and  aesthetic  seed  which 
Wagner  sowed  had  ripened  into  a 
maturer  harvest  than  was  possible  in 
his  own  time  —  it  had  to  wait,  in 
short,  until  to-day.  For  there  are 
those  of  us  who  believe  that  the 
feat  has  at  last  been  actually 
achieved  —  that  the  principles  of 
musico-dramatic  structure  inimi- 
tably stated  by  Gluck  in  his  preface 
to  "Alceste''  have  been,  for  the 
first  time,  carried  out  with  absolute 
fidelity  to  their  spirit ;  and,  more- 
over, with  that  cohesion  of  or- 
ganism which  Gluck  signally  failed 
142 


MODERN    OPERA 

to  achieve,  and  with  that  fineness  of 
dramatic  instinct  the  lack  of  which 
is  Wagner's  prime  deficiency. 

IV 

It  is  not  every  generation  that 
can  witness  the  emergence  of  a 
masterpiece  which  may  truly  be 
called  epoch-making ;  yet  when 
France  —  not  the  Italy  of  Peri  and 
Monteverdi ;  nor  the  Germany  of 
Gluck  and  Wagner  —  produced, 
doubtless  to  the  stupefaction  of  the 
shades  of  Meyerbeer, ,  Bizet,  and 
Gounod,  the  *' Pelleas  et  Me- 
lisande ''  of  Claude  Debussy,  it 
produced  a  work  which  is  as  com- 
H3 


/ 


ASPECTS   OF 

manding  in  quality  as  it  is  unique 
in  conception  and  design. 

It  has  been  left  for  Debussy  to 
write  an  absolutely  new  page  in 
the  eventful  history  of  the  opera. 
This  remarkable  composer  is  to- 
day regarded  with  suspicion  by  the 
vigilant  conservators  of  our  musical 
integrity  —  those  who  are  vigorous 
and  unconquerable  champions  of 
aesthetic  progress  so  long  as  it  in- 
volves no  change  in  established 
methods  and  no  reversal  of  tra- 
ditions; for  he  has  shown  a  per- 
verse disinclination  to  conform  to 
V  those  rules  of  procedure  which,  in 
^     music  as  in  the  other  arts,  are  held 

H4 


MODERN    OPERA 

to  be  inviolable  until  they  are  set 
aside  by  the  practice  of  successive 
generations  of  inspired  innovators. 
He  has,  in  brief,  affronted  the  ortho- 
dox by  creating  a  form  and  method 
ofhisown,and  one  which  stubbornly 
refuses  to  square  with  any  of  the  rec- 
ognised laws  of  the  game.  He  is 
nowhere  so  significant  a  phenome- 
non to  the  curious  student  of  musi- 
cal development  as  in  his  setting  of 
Maeterlinck's  drama.  For  the  first 
time  in  the  history  of  opera  we  are 
confronted  here  with  the  spectacle 
of  a  lyric-drama  in  which,  while 
the    drama    itself     lM>1df=    wM^^^^^h^- 

com promise   the    paramount   place^ 
lo  145 


/ 


ASPECTS  OF 

in  the  structural  scheme,  the  musi- 
cal envelope  with  which  it  is  sur- 
rounded is  not  only  transparent  and 
intensifying,  but,  as  music,  beauti- 
ful and  remarkable  in  an  extraord- 
inary degree.  The  point  to  be 
emphasised  is  this:  that  the  post- 
ulate of  Count  Bardi's  sixteenth 
century  "reformers,''  formulated  by 
Gluck  almost  two  hundred  years 
later  in  the  principle  that  the  true 
function  of  music  in  the  opera  is 
"to  second  poetry  in  expressing  the 
emotions  and  situations  of  the  plot," 
has  its  first  consistent  and  effective 
application    in   Debussy's    "  Pelleas  "* 

et  Melisande."  What  the  Cameratdy 
146 


MODERN    OPERA 

and  their  successors,  could  not  ac- 
complish for  lack  of  adequate  musi- 
cal means,  what  Gluck  fell  short 
of  compassing  for  want  of  boldness 
and  reach  of  vision,  what  Wagner 
might  have  effected  but  for  too 
great  a  preoccupation  with  one 
phase  of  the  problem,  a  French- 
man of  to-day  has  quietly  and 
(I  say  it  deliberately)  perfectly 
achieved. 

His  success  is  as  much  a  result 
of  time  and  circumstance  and  the 
slow  growth  of  the  art  as  of  a  pre- 
eminent natural  fitness  for  the  task. 
The  Florentines,  for  all  their  eager- 
ness and  sincerity,  were  helj 
H7 


ASPECTS   OF 

before  the  problem  of  putting  their 
principles  into  concrete  and  effec- 
tive form,  for  they  were  hopelessly- 
blocked  by  reason  of  the  desperate 
I  poverty  of  the  musical  means  at 
their  disposal.  Spurning  the  elab- 
orate and  lovely  art  of  the  contra- 
puntists, they  found  themselves 
in  the  sufficiently  hopeless  situation 
of  artists  filled  with  passionate  con- 
victions but  without  tools  —  in 
other  words,  they  aspired  to  write 
dramatic  music  for  single  voices 
and  instruments  with  nothing  to 
aid  them  save  a  rudimentary 
harmonic   system    and    an    almost 

L  non-existent    orchestra,    and    with 
148 


MODERN   OPERA 

virtually  no  perception  of  the  pos- 
sibilities of  melodic  effect.  Their 
failure  was  due,  not  to  any  in- 
firmity of  purpose,  but  to  a  simple 
lack  of  materials.  Of  Gluck  it  is 
to  be  said  that,  ardent  and  admirable 
reformer  as  he  was,  and  clear  as  was 
his  perception  of  the  rightful  de- 
mands of  the  drama  in  any  serious 
association  with  music,  he  failed,  as 
Mr.  Henry  T.  Finck  justly  says,  to 
effect  a  "  real  amalgamation  of 
music  and  drama,''  failed  to  strike 
out  "  a  form  organically  connecting 
each  part  of  the  opera  with  every! 
other."  His  unconnected  "  num- 
bers,*' his  indulgence  in  vocal  em- 
149 


ASPECTS    OF 

broidery,  his  retention  of  many  of 
the  encumbrances  of  the  operatic 
machinery,  are  all  testimony  to  a 
not  very  rigorous  or  far-seeing  re- 
formatory impulse.  If,  as  Mr. 
Finck  pointedly  observes,  he  **  in- 
sisted on  the  claims  of  the  composer 
as  against  the  singer,  he  did  not,  on 
the  other  hand,  alter  the  relations 
of  poet  and  composer.  Such  a 
thing  as  allowing  the  drama  to  con- 
dition the  form  of  the  music  never 
occurred  to  him.''  A  spontaneous 
master  of  musico-dramatic  speech, 
he  stopped  far  short  of  striking  out 
a  form  of  lyric-drama  in  which  the 

music  was  really  made  to  exercise, 
150 


MODERN   OPERA 

continuously  and  undeviatingly, 
what  he  stated  to  be  "  its  true  func- 
tion/' It  would  be  absurd  to  dis- 
pute the  fact  that  his  sense  of 
dramatic  expression  was  both  keen 
and  rich ;  but  it  was  an  instinct 
which  manifested  itself  in  isolated 
and  particular  instances,  and  it  was 
not  strong  enough  or  exigent 
enough  to  compel  him  to  devise  a 
new  and  more  intelligent  manner 
of  treating  his  dramatic  text  as  a 
whole. 

Of  the  degree  in  which  Wagner 
fell  short  of  embodying  his  princi- 
ples —  which    were    of   course    in 

essence  the  principles  of  the  Floren- 
151 


ASPECTS   OF 

tines  and  of  Gluck  —  and  the  evi- 
dent reason  for  his  failure,  enough 
has  already  been  said.  So  we  come 
again  to  Debussy.  For  it  is  a 
singular  fact  —  and  this  is  the 
point  to  insist  upon  —  that  this 
French  mystic  of  to-day  is  the  first 
opera-maker  in  the  records  of  musi- 
cal art  who  has  exhibited  the  cour- 
age, and  who  has  possessed  the 
means,  to  carry  the  principles  of 
the  Cameratay  of  Gluck,  and  of 
Wagner  to  their  ultimate  conclu- 
sion. In  "  Pelleas  et  Melisande  " 
he  has  made  his  music  serve  his 
dramatic   subject,  in   all    its    parts, 

with  absolute    fidelity   and    consis- 
152 


MODERN   OPERA 

tency,  and  with  a  rigorous  and 
unswerving  logic  that  is  without 
parallel  in  the  history  of  operatic 
art;  we  are  here  as  far  from  the 
method  of  Richard  Strauss,  with  its 
translation  of  the  entire  dramatic 
material  into  the  terms  of  the  sym- 
phonic poem,  and  with  the  sing- 
ing actors  contending  against  a 
Gargantuan  and  merciless  orchestra 
(which  is  nothing,  after  all,  but 
an  exaggeration  of  the  method  of 
Wagner),  as  we  are  from  the  futile 
cxperimentings  of  the  Camerata. 

V 

One    cannot   but   wonder    what 
153 


ASPECTS   OF 

Hazlitt,  who  could  not  think  of 
beauty,  simplicity,  or  sensibility  as 
qualities  having  any  possible  associa- 
tion with  opera,  would  have  said  of 
a  manner  of  writing  for  the  lyric 
stage  which  ignores  even  those  op- 
portunities for  musical  effect  which 
composers  of  unimpeachable  artistic 
integrity  have  always  held  to  be 
desirable  and  legitimate.  There  is 
an  even  richer  invitation  to  the 
Spirit  of  Comedy  in  trying  to  im- 
agine what  Richard  Wagner  would 
have  said  to  the  suggestion  of  a 
lyric-drama  in  which  the  orchestra 
is  not  employed  at  its  full  strength 
more  than  three  times  in  the  course 
154 


MODERN   OPERA 

of  a  score  almost  as  long  as  that  of 
"  Tristan  und  Isolde/'  and  in  which 
the  singers  scarcely  ever  raise  their 
voices  above  a  mex%o-forte.  De- 
bussy's orchestra  is  unrivalled  in 
musico-dramatic  art  for  the  ex- 
quisite justness  with  which  it  en- 
forces the  moods  and  action  of  the 
play.  It  never  seduces  the  atten- 
tion of  the  auditor  from  the  essential 
concerns  of  the  drama  itself:  never, 
as  with  Wagner,  tyrannically  ab- 
sorbs the  mind.  Always  in  this 
unexampled  music-drama  there  is 
maintained,  as  to  emphasis  and  in- 
tensity, a  scrupulous  balance  be- 
tween the  movement  of  the  drama 
155 


ASPECTS    OF 

and  the  tonal  undercurrent  which 
is  its  complement :  the  music  is 
absolutely  merged  in  the  play, 
suffusing  it,  colouring  it,  but  never 
dominating  or  transcending  it.  It 
is  for  this  reason  that  it  deserves, 
as  an  exemplification  of  the  ideal 
manner  of  constructing  a  music- 
drama,  the  hazardous  epithet  **  per- 
fect"; for  it  is,  one  cannot  too 
often  repeat,  a  work  far  more  faith- 
ful to  Wagner's  avowed  principles 
than  are  his  own  magnificently  in- 
consistent scores.  In  this  music 
there  is  no  excess  of  gesture,  there 
is  none  of  Wagner's  gorgeously  ex- 
pansive rhetoric  :  the  "  Je  t'aime," 
156 


MODERN    OPERA 

**Je  t'aime  aussi "  of  Debussy's 
lovers  are  expressed  with  a  simpli- 
city and  a  stark  sincerity  which 
could  not  well  go  further  ;  and  it 
is  a  curious  and  significant  fact  that 
the  moment  of  their  profoundest 
ecstasy,  though  it  is  artfully  and 
eloquently  prepared,  is  represented 
in  the  orchestra  by  a  blank  measure, 
a  moment  of  complete  silence. 
This,  indeed,  is  almost  the  supreme 
distinction  of  Debussy's  music- 
drama  :  that  it  should  be  at  once  so 
eloquent  and  so  discreet :  that  it 
should  be,  in  the  exposition  of  its 
subject-matter,  so  rich  and  intense 

yet  so  delicately  and  heedfully  reti- 
157 


ASPECTS    OF 

cent.  After  the  grave  speech  and 
simple  gestures  of  these  naive  yet 
subtle  and  passionate  tragedians,  as 
Debussy  has  translated  them  into 
fluid  tone,  the  posturings  and  the 
rhetoric  of  Wagner's  splendid  per- 
sonages seem,  for  a  time,  violently 
extravagant,  excessive,  and  over- 
wrought. To  attempt  to  resist  the 
imperious  sway  which  the  most 
superb  of  musical  romantics  must 
always  exert  over  his  kingdom 
would  be  a  futile  endeavour  ;  yet  it 
cannot  be  denied  that  for  some  the 
method  of  Debussy  as  a  musical 
dramatist  will  seem  the  more  viable 

and  the  more  sound,  as  it  is  grate- 
'58 


MODERN    OPERA 

ful  to  the  mind  a  little  wearied  by 
the  drums  and  tramplings  of  Wag- 
nerian conquests. 

His  use  of  the  orchestra  differs 
from  Wagner's  in  degree  rather 
than  in  kind.  As  he  employs  it, 
it  is  a  veracious  and  pointed  com- 
mentary on  the  text  and  the  action 
of  the  play,  underlining  the  signifi- 
cance of  the  former  and  colouring 
and  intensifying  the  latter  ;  but  its 
comments  are  infinitely  less  copious 
and  voluble  than  are  Wagner's  — 
indeed,  their  reticence  and  discre- 
tion are,  as  it  has  been  said,  extreme. 
Debussy's  choric  orchestra  is  often 

as  remarkable  for  what  it  does  not 
159 


ASPECTS   OF 

say  as  for  what  it  does.  Can  one, 
for  example,  imagine  Wagner  being 
able  to  resist  the  temptation  to  in- 
dulge in  some  graphic  and  detailed 
tone-painting,  at  the  cost  of  delay- 
ing the  action  and  overloading  the 
score,  at  the  passage  wherein  Golaudy 
coming  upon  the  errant  and  weep- 
ing Melts ande  in  the  forest,  and  see- 
ing her  crown  at  the  bottom  of  the 
spring  where  she  has  thrown  it, 
asks  her  what  it  is  that  shines  in  the 
water  ?  Yet  observe  the  curiously 
insinuating  effect  which  results  from 
Debussy's  deft  and  reticent  treat- 
ment of  this  episode — t\\Q pianissimo 

chords  on  the  muted  horns,  followed 
1 60 


MODERN   OPERA 

by  a  measure  in  which  the  voices 
declaim  alone.  And  would  not 
Wagner  have  wrung  the  last  drop 
of  emotion  out  of  the  death  scene 
oi  Melisande?  —  a  scene  for  which 
Debussy  has  written  music  of  almost 
insupportable  poignancy,  yet  of  a 
quality  so  reserved  and  unforced 
that  it  enters  the  consciousness  al- 
most unperceived  as  music. 

The  discursive  and  exegetical 
tendencies  of  Wagner  are  forgot- 
ten ;  nor  are  we  reminded  of  the 
manner  in  which  Strauss,  in  his 
"Salome,''  overlays  the  speech  and 
action    of  the    characters    with    a 

dense,  oppressive,  and  many-stranded 
II  i6i 


ASPECTS    OF 

web  of  tone.     Yet  always  Debussy's 

musical  comment  is  intimately  and 

truthfully  reflective  of  what  passes 

visibly  upon  the  stage  and  in  the 

hearts  of  his  dramatic  personages ; 

though  often    it    transmits  not    so 

much  the  actual  speech  and  apparent 

emotions  of  the  characters,  as  that 

dim  and   pseudonymous  reality,  — 

"the  thing  behind   the  thing,''  as 

the  Celts  have  named  it,  —  which 

hovers,   unspoken   and  undeclared, 

in  the  background  of  Maeterlinck's 

wonderful  play.     We  are  reminded 

at  times,  in  listening  to  this  lucent 

and  fluid  current  of  orchestral  tone, 

of  Villiers  de  L' Isle- Adam's  descrip- 
162 


MODERN    OPERA 

tion     of   the    voice    of   his    Elen : 

"...  it  was  taciturn,  subdued,  like 

the  murmur    of  the    river    Lethe, 

flowing     through     the     region    of 

shadows.''      This  orchestra,  seldom 

elaborate    in   thematic    exfoliation, 

and  still  less  frequently  polyphonic 

in   texture,  is,  for   the  most  part, 

a   voice   that   speaks   in   hints   and 

through  allusions.     The  huge  and 

imperious  eloquence   of  Wagner  is 

not  to  be  sought  for  here.     Taine 

once  spoke  of  the  "  violent  sorcery  " 

of  Victor  Hugo's  style,  and  it  is  a 

phrase    that    comes    often    to    the 

mind  in  thinking  of  the  music  of 

the    titanic    German.      Debussy   in 
163 


ASPECTS    OF 

his  "  Pelleas  '*  has  written  music 
that  is  rich  in  sorcery  ;  but  it  is  not 
violent.  In  it  inheres  a  capacity 
for  expression,  and  a  quality  of 
enchantment  in  the  result,  that 
music  had  not  before  exerted  —  an 
enchantment  that  invades  the  mind 
by  stealth  yet  holds  it  with  en- 
chaining power.  In  a  curious 
degree  the  music  is  both  contem- 
plative and  impassioned ;  its  per- 
vading note  is  that  of  still  flame,  of 
emotional  quietude  —  the  sweeping 
and  cosmic  winds  of  "  Tristan  und 
Isolde"  are  absent.  Yet  the  dramatic 
fibre  of  the  score  is  strong  and  rich  ; 

for  all  its  fineness  and  delicacy  of 
164 


MODERN    OPERA 

texture  and  its  economy  of  accent, 
it  is  neither  amorphous  nor  inert. 

VI 

Tristan  and  Isolde^  in  moments  of 
exalted  emotion,  utter  that  emotion 
with  the  frankest  lyricism  ;  Pelleas 
and  Melisande,  in  moments  of  like 
fervour,  still  adhere  to  the  unformed 
and  unsymmetrical  declamation  in 
which  their  language  is  elsewhere 
couched.  It  is  the  orchestra  which 
sings — which,  passionately  or  medi- 
tatively, colours  the  dramatic  mo- 
ment. Wherein  we  come  to  what 
is  perhaps   the  most  extraordinary 

feature  of  this  extraordinary  score : 
165 


ASPECTS   OF 

the  treatment  of  the  voice-parts. 
Debussy's  accomplishment  in  this 
respect,  justly  summarised,  is  this : 
He  has  released  the  orchestra  from 
its  thraldom  to  the  methods  of  the 
symphonic  poem  (to  which  Wag- 
ner committed  it)  by  making  it  a 
background,  a  support,  rather  than 
a  thing  of  procrustean  dominance, 
thus  restoring  liberty  and  transpar- 
ency of  dramatic  utterance  to  the 
singing  actors.  He  himself  has  suc- 
cintly  stated  the  principles  which 
guided  him  in  his  manner  of  writ- 
ing for  the  voices  in  "  Pelleas." 
"  I  have  been  reproached,"  he  has 

said,    "  because    in    my    score    the 
i66 


MODERN    OPERA 

melodic  phrase  is  always  found  in 
the  orchestra,  never  in  the  voice. 
I  vi^ished  —  intended,  in  fact, — 
that  the  action  should  never  be 
arrested  ;  that  it  should  be  continu- 
ous, uninterruDted.  I  wanted  to 
dispense  with  parasitic  musical 
phrases.  When  listening  to  a 
[musico-dramatic]  work,  the  spec- 
tator is  wont  to  experience  two 
kinds  of  emotion :  the  musical 
emotion  on  the  one  hand  ;  and  the 
emotion  of  the  character  [in  the 
drama],  on  the  other.  Generally 
these  are  felt  successively.  I  have 
tried  to  blend  these  two  emotions, 

and     make      them      simultaneous. 
167 


ASPECTS   OF 

Melody  is,  if  I  may  say  so,  almost 
anti-lyric,  and  powerless  to  express 
the  constant  change  of  emotion  or 
life.  Melody  is  suitable  only  for 
the  song  [c/ianson],  which  confirms 
a  fixed  sentiment.  I  have  never 
been  willing  that  my  music  should 
hinder  .  .  .  the  changes  of  senti- 
ment and  passion  felt  by  my  char- 
acters. Its  demands  are  ignored  as 
soon  as  it  is  necessary  that  these 
should  have  perfect  liberty  in  tlieir 
gestures  as  in  their  cries,  in  their 
joys  as  in  their  sorrow." 

Now  Debussy  in  his  public  excur- 
sions as  a  critic  is  not  always  to  be 

taken  seriously ;  indeed,  it  is  alto- 
i68 


MODERN    OPERA 

gether  unlikely  that  he  has  refrained 
from  demonstrations  of  exquisite 
delight  over  the  startled  or  con- 
temptuous comment  which  some  of 
his  vivacious  heresies  concerning 
certain  of  the  gods  of  music  have 
evoked.  These  published  appraise- 
ments of  his  are,  of  course,  nothing 
more  than  impertinent,  though  at 
times  apt  and  s3.g2Lcious,jeux  d'esprit. 
But  when  he  speaks  seriously,  as  in 
the  defence  of  his  practice  which 
I  have  just  quoted,  of  the  menace 
of  "parasitic'*  musical  phrases  in 
the  voice-parts,  and  when  he  ob- 
serves that  melody,  when  it  oc- 
curs in  the  speech  of  characters 
169 


ASPECTS    OF 

in  music-drama,  is  "almost  anti- 
lyric,"  he  speaks  with  penetration 
and  truth.  His  practice,  which 
illustrates  it,  amounts  to  this :  He 
employs  in  "  Pelleas  "  a  continuous 
declamation,  uncadenced,  entirely 
unmelodic  (in  the  sense  in  which 
melodious  declarnation  has  been 
understood).  Save  for  a  brief  and 
particular  instance,  there  is  no  melo- 
dic form  whatsoever,  from  begin- 
ning to  end  of  the  score.  There  is  not 
a  hint  of  the  Wagnerian  arioso.  The 
declamation  is  founded  throughout 
upon  the  natural  inflections  of  the 
voice  in    speaking  —  it  is,  indeed, 

virtually  an  electrified  and  height- 
170 


MODERN    OPERA 

ened  form  of  speech.  It  is  never 
musical,  for  the  sake  of  sheer  musi- 
cal beauty,  when  the  emotion  within 
the  text  or  situation  does  not  lift  it 
to  the  plane  where  the  quality  of 
utterance  tends  naturally  and  inevi- 
tably toward  lyricism  of  accent. 
He  does  not,  for  example,  commit 
the  kind  of  indiscretion  that 
Wagner  commits  when  he  makes 
Isolde  sing  the  highly  unlyrical  line, 
"  Der  *  Tantris '  mit  sorgender  List 
sich  nannte,''  to  a  phrase  that  has 
the  double  demerit  of  being  "  para- 
sitically ''  and  intrusively  melodic 
and  wholly  conventional  in  pattern 

—  one  of  those  musical  platitudes 

171 


ASPECTS   OF 

which  have  no  excuse  for  existence 
in  any  sincere  and  vital  score.  Nor 
in  **Pelleas*'  do  the  singers  ever 
sing,  it  need  hardly  be  said,  anything 
remotely  approaching  a  duet,  a  con- 
certed number,  or  a  chorus  (the 
snatches  of  distant  song  heard  from 
the  sailors  on  the  departing  ship 
is  a  mere  touch  of  atmospheric 
suggestion).  The  dialogue  is  every- 
where and  always  clearly  individual- 
ised, as  in  the  spoken  drama.  Yet 
this  surprising  fact  is  to  be  noted : 
undeviatingly  naturalistic  as  are  the 
voice-parts  in  their  structure  and  in- 
flection, and  despite  their   haughty 

and  stoic  intolerance  of  melodic  ef- 
172 


MODERN   OPERA 

feet,  they  yet  are  so  contrived  that 
they  often  yield  —  incidentally,  as 
it  were  —  effects  of  musical  beauty  ; 
and  in  so  doing,  they  demonstrate 
the  unfamiliar  truth  that  there  is 
possible  in  music-drama  a  use  of 
the  voice  which  permits  of  an  ex- 
pressiveness that  is  both  telling  and 
beautiful,  though  it  yields  nothing 
that  accepted  canons  would  warrant 
us  in  describing  as  either  melody  or 
melodious  declamation.  Now  Mr. 
Baughan,  whose  views  concern- 
ing Wagner  and  his  habits  have 
been  discussed,  craves  in  the  music- 
dramas  of  Wagner  a  frankness  of 
melody  in  the  vocal  writing  whose 
>73 


ASPECTS    OF 

absence  he  deplores;  and  he  seems 
to  think  that  when  this  melodious- 
ness of  utterance  is  denied  to  the 
voices  in  modern  opera,  all  that  is 
left  them  is  something  "that  an 
orchestral  instrument  could  do  as 
well" — something  that,  inferen- 
entially,  is  anti-vocal,  or  at  least  un- 
idiomatic.  It  would  seem  that 
Mr.  Baughan,  and  those  who  think 
as  he  does,  fail  to  realise,  as  I  have 
remarked  before,  the  immensely 
important  part  which  it  is  possible 
for  modern  harmony  to  play  in  the 
combination  of  a  voice  and  accom- 
panying instruments.     It  would  not 

be  difficult   to   demonstrate  that  a 
174 


MODERN    OPERA 

large  part  of  what  we  are  in  the 
habit  of  regarding  as  a  purely  melo- 
dic form  of  vocal  expression  in  the 
modern  lyric-drama  owes  a  large  and 
unsuspected  measure  of  its  potency 
of  effect  to  the  modulatory  charac- 
ter of  its  harmonic  support.  Take 
a  passage  that  we  are  apt  to  think 
of  as  one  of  the  most  ravishingly 
and  purely  melodious  in  the  whole 
of  that  fathomless  well  of  lyric 
beauty,  "  Tristan  und  Isolde  '' — the 
passage  in  the  duet  in  the  second 
act  beginning,  "  Bricht  mein  Blick 
sich  wonn*  erblindet/*  As  one 
hears  it  sung  by  the  two  voices  above 
the  orchestra,  it  seems  a  perfect  ex- 
175 


ASPECTS    OF 

ample  of  pure  melodic  inspiration  ; 
yet  play  the  voice-parts,  alone  or 
together,  without  their  harmonic 
undercurrent,  and  all  the  beauty,  all 
the  meaning,  vanish  at  once :  with- 
out the  kaleidescopic  harmonic  color 
the  melodic  phrases  are  without 
point,  coherence,  or  design.  But 
this  is  aside  from  the  point  that  I 
would  make  —  that  the  potentiaU- 
ties  of  modern  harmony  make 
possible  a  use  of  the  voice  in  music- 
drama  which,  while  it  is  remote 
from  the  character  of  formal 
melody,  may  yet  be  productive  of 
a  kind  of  emotional  eloquence  that 

is  exceedingly  puissant  and  beauti- 
176 


MODERN    OPERA 

ful,  and  that  may  even  possess  a 
seemingly  lyric  quality.  We  find  a 
foreshadowing  of  this  kind  of  effect 
in  such  a  passage  as  Tristan  s  **  Bin 
ich  in  Kornwall?'*  where  all  of 
the  haunting  effect  of  the  phrase 
is  due  to  the  modulation  in  the 
harmony  into  the  G-major  chord 
at  the  first  syllable  of  "Kornwall." 
And  one  might  point  out  to  Mr. 
Baughan  that  this  effect  is  subtly 
dependent  upon  the  co-operation  of 
the  voice  and  the  instruments. 
The  phrase  in  the  voice-part  is 
not  one  "  that  an  orchestral  instru- 
ment could   do   as   well/'    as    Mr. 

Baughan  would  at  once  recognise 
12  177 


ASPECTS   OF 

if  he  were  to  play  the  accompany- 
ing chords  on  a  piano  and  give  the 
progression  in  the  voice  to  a  'cello 
or  a  violin. 

But  while  Wagner  foreshadowed 
this  manner  of  making  his  har- 
monic support  confer  a  special  char- 
acter upon  the  effect  of  the  voice- 
part,  he  did  not  begin  to  sound  its 
possibilities.  That  was  left  for 
Debussy  to  do ;  and  for  the  task  he 
was  obviously  equipped  in  a  surpass- 
ing degree  by  his  unprecedentedly 
flexible,  plastic,  and  resourceful 
harmonic  vocabulary  —  the  richest 
harmonic  instrument,  beyond  com- 
parison, that  music  has  yet  known. 
178 


MODERN   OPERA 

The  score  of  "Pelleas"  overflows 
with  instances  of  this  —  one  may 
paradoxically  call  it  harmonic  —  use 
of  the  voice:  things  that  Wagner, 
with  his  comparatively  limited  har- 
monic range,  could  not  have  accom- 
plished. As  instances  where  the 
voice-part,  without  being  inher- 
ently melodic,  borrows  a  semblance 
of  almost  lyrical  beauty  from  its 
harmonic  associations,  consider  the 
passage  in  the  grotto  scene  begin- 
ning at  Pelleas'  words,  "  Elle  est 
tres  grande  et  tres  belle,''  and  con- 
tinuing to  **  Donnez-moi  la  main'' ; 
or  the  astonishing  passage  in  the 
final  love  scene  beginning  at  Pelleas* 

179 


ASPECTS   OF 

words,   "On  a  brise  la  glace  avec 

dcs  fers  rougis  ! "   or,  in  the  last  act, 

the  expression  that  is  given  to  Mel- 

isandes  phrase,  "la  grande  fenetre 

.   .   .  *'     Yet    note    that   in     such 

passages    the    voice-part    does  not, 

in    Mr.   Baughan's  phrase,   merely 

"  weave  up  ''  with  the  orchestra,  as 

he  protests  that  it  does  in  Wagner's 

practice;    in  other  words,  it  is  not 

simply  an  incidental  strand  in  the 

general   harmonic   texture ;    it   has 

character   and    individuality   of  its 

own,  though   these   are   absolutely 

dependent  for  their  full  effect  upon 

their  harmonic  background.     Nor 

is  it,  on  the  other  hand,  so  assertive 
1 80 


MODERN    OPERA 

and  conspicuous  that  it  comes 
within  the  class  of  that  which  De- 
bussy repudiates  as  **  parasitic/* 
Here,  then,  is  a  method  of  uttering 
the  text  that  not  only  permits  of  a 
just  and  veracious  rendering  of 
every  possible  dramatic  nuance,  but 
which,  by  virtue  of  the  means  of 
musical  enforcement  that  are  applied 
to  it,  takes  on  a  character  and 
quality,  as  music,  which  are  as 
influential  as  they  are  unparalleled. 

VII 

It  has  been  affirmed  that  in 
"Pelleas  et  Melisande "  Debussy 
has  produced  a  work  as  command- 

i8i 


ASPECTS    OF 

ing  in  quality  as  it  is  unique  in 
conception  and  design.  Let  us 
consider  what  grounds  there  may- 
be for  the  assertion. 

To  begin  with,  its  spiritual  and 
emotional  flavour  are  without  an- 
alogy in  the  previous  history,  not 
merely  of  opera,  but  of  music. 
Debussy  is  a  man  of  unhampered 
and  clairvoyant  imagination,  a 
dreamer  with  a  far-wandering  vision. 
He  views  the  spectacle  of  the  world 
through  the  magic  casements  of 
the  mystic  who  is  also  a  poet  and 
visionary.  One  can  easily  conceive 
him   as  taking   the   more  tranquil 

part  in   that  provocative    dialogue 
182 


MODERN    OPERA 

put  by  Mr.  Yeats  into  the  mouths 
of  two  of  his  dramatic  characters : 

"And  what  in  the  living  world  can 
happen  to  a  man  that  is  asleep  on  his 
bed  ?  Work  must  go  on  and  coach- 
building  must  go  on,  and  they  will 
not  go  on  the  time  there  is  too  much 
attention  given  to  dreams.  A  dream 
is  a  sort  of  a  shadow,  no  profit  in  it 
to  anyone  at  all.** 

"  There  are  some  would  answer  you 
that  it  is  to  those  who  are  awake  that 
nothing  happens,  and  it  is  they  who 
know  nothing.  He  that  is  asleep  on 
his  bed  is  gone  where  all  have  gone 
for  supreme  truth.** 

In  Maeterlinck's  "  Pelleas  et 
Melisande,**  Debussy  has,  through 
a  fortunate  conjunction  of  circum- 


ASPECTS    OF 

stances,  found  a  perfect  vehicle  for 
his  impulses  and  preoccupations. 
There  will  always  be,  naturally 
enough,  persons  who  must  inevi- 
tably regard  such  a  work  as  that 
for  which  he  and  Maeterlinck  are 
now  responsible  as,  for  the  most 
part,  vain,  inutile,  even  prepos- 
terous. They  are  sincere  in  their 
dislike,  these  forthright  and  excel- 
lent people,  and  they  are  to  be 
commiserated,  for  they  are,  in  such 
a  region  of  the  imagination  as  this 
drama  builds  up  about  them,  aliens 
in  a  world  whose  ways  and  whose 
wonders    must    be    forever    hidden 

from   their  most  determined  scru- 
184 


MODERN   OPERA 

tiny.  Such  robust  and  worldly 
spirits,  writes  a  thoughtful  contem- 
porary essayist,  "  that  swim  so  vigor- 
ously on  the  surface  of  things,''  have 
always  **  a  suspicion,  a  jealousy,  a 
contempt,  for  one  who  dives  deeper 
and  brings  back  tidings  of  the 
strange  secrets  that  the  depth 
holds'*:  they  will  not  even  grant 
that  the  depths  are  anything  save 
murky,  that  the  tidings  have  va- 
lidity or  importance.  They  take 
comfort  in  their  detachment,  and 
are  apt  to  speak  of  themselves,  with 
mock  humility,  as  "plain,  blunt 
persons,"     for    whom    the   alleged 

vacuities  of  such  an  order  of  art  are 
1 8s 


ASPECTS    OF 

comfortably  negligible.  Well,  it 
is,  after  all,  as  Maeterlinck's  Pelleas 
himself  observes,  a  matter  not  so 
much  for  mirth  as  for  lament;  yet 
even  more  is  it  a  matter  for  resigna- 
tion. There  will  always  be,  as  has 
been  observed,  an  immense  and  con- 
fident majority  for  whom  that  ter- 
ritory of  the  creative  imagination 
which  lies  over  the  boundaries  of 
the  palpable  world  will  seem  worse 
than  delusive  :  who  will  always  and 
sincerely  pin  their  faith  to  that 
which  is  definite  and  concrete,  pat- 
ent and  direct,  and  who  must  in  all 
honesty  reject  that  which  is  unde- 
clared, allusive,  crepuscular :  which 

i86 


MODERN   OPERA 

communicates  itself  through  echoes 
and  in  glimpses ;  by  means  of  inti- 
mations, signs,  and  tokens.  For 
them  it  would  be  of  no  avail  to 
point  to  the  dictum  of  one  who, 
like  Maeterlinck,  is  aware  of  remote 
voices  and  strange  dreams  :  **  Dra- 
matic art,''  he  has  wisely  said,  "is 
a  method  of  expression,  and  neither 
a  hair-breadth  escape  nor  a  love 
affair  more  befits  it  than  the  pas- 
sionate exposition  of  the  most  deli- 
cate and  strange  intuitions  ;  and  the 
dramatist  is  as  free  as  the  painter  of 
good  pictures  and  the  writer  of 
good  books.     All  art  is  passionate, 

but  a   flame  is  not   the  less  flame 
187 


ASPECTS    OF 

because  we  change  the  candle  for  a 
lamp  or  the  lamp  for  a  fire ;  and 
all  flame  is  beautiful/* 

It  is  a  dictum  that  is  scarcely- 
calculated  to  persuade  a  very  gen- 
eral acceptance  :  a  "  passionate  ex- 
position of  the  most  delicate  and 
strange  intuitions  ''  is  not  precisely 
the  kind  of  aesthetic  fare  which  the 
"  plain,  blunt  man,"  glorying  in  his 
plainness  and  his  bluntness,  is  apt  to 
relish.  It  is  a  point  upon  which  it 
is  perhaps  needless  to  dwell ;  but 
its  recognition  serves  as  explanation 
of  the  fact  that  the  music-drama  into 
which    Debussy    has     transformed 

Maeterlinck's  play  should  not  every- 
i88 


MODERN    OPERA 

where  and  always  be  either  accepted 
or  understood.  For  in  the  musical 
setting  of  Debussy,  Maeterlinck's 
drama  ^has  found  its  perfect  equiva- 
lent :  the  qualities  of  the  music  are 
the  qualities  of  the  play,  completely 
and  exactly ;  and,  sharing  its  quali- 
ties, it  has  evoked  and  will  always 
evoke  the  more  or  less  contemptuous 
antagonism  of  those  for  whom  it 
has  little  or  nothing  to  say. 

Of  the  quality  of  its  style,  perhaps 
the  most  obvious  trait  to  note  is  its 
divergence  from  the  kind  of  music- 
making  which  we  are  accustomed 
to  regard  as  typically  French.     We 

have  come  to  regard  as  inevitable 

189 


ASPECTS    OF 

the  clear-cut  precision,  the  finesse, 
the  instinctive  grace  of  French 
music ;  but  we  are  not  at  all  accus- 
tomed to  discovering  this  fineness 
of  texture  allied  with  marked  emo- 
tional richness,  with  depth  and  sub- 
stance of  thought  —  we  do  not  look 
for  such  an  alliance,  nor  find  it,  in 
any  French  music  from  Rameau  to 
Saint-Saens,  Gounod,  and  Masse- 
net. Yet  Debussy  has  the  typical 
French  clarity  and  fineness  of  sur- 
face without  the  French  hardness 
of  edge  and  thinness  of  substance. 
The  contours  of  his  music  are  as 
melting  and  elastic  as  its  emotional 

substance  is  rich ;  and  it  is  phantas- 
190 


MODERN    OPERA 

mal  rather  than  definite  and  clear- 
cut  ;  evasive  rather  than  direct.  His 
art,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  has  its  roots 
in  the  literature  rather  than  in  the 
music  of  his  country.  His  true  fore- 
bears are  not  Rameau,  Couperin, 
Boieldieu,  Bizet,  Saint-Saens,  but 
Baudelaire,  Verlaine,  Mallarme;  and, 
beyond  his  own  frontier,  Rossetti 
and  Maeterlinck.  There  is  scarcely 
a  trace  of  French  musical  influence 
in  the  score  of  ^*  Pelleas,'*  save  for 
its  limpidity  of  expression  and  its 
delicate  logic  of  structure.  The 
truth  is  that  Debussy,  v/ith  d'Indy, 
Ravel,     and    others,    has    made    it 

impossible    to    speak    any    longer, 
191 


ASPECTS    OF 

without  qualification,  of  "  French  " 
quality,  or  "French"  style,  in 
music;  for  to-day  there  is  the  French 
of  Saint-Saens  and  Massenet,  and 
the  French  of  Debussy,  d'Indy, 
Duparc,  Faure,  Ravel :  and  the  two 
orders  are  as  inassociable  under  a 
generic  yoke  as  are  the  poetry  of 
Hugo  and  the  poetry  of  Verlaine. 

But  the  essential  thing  to  observe 
and  to  praise  in  this  music  is  its 
astonishing,  its  almost  incredible, 
affluence  of  substance :  its  richness 
in  ideas  that  are  both  extraordinarily 
beautiful  and  wholly  new.  The 
score,  in  this  respect  alone,  is  epoch- 
making.  Debussy  is  the  first  music- 
192 


MODERN    OPERA 

maker  since  Wagner  to  evolve  a 
kind  of  style  of  which  the  sub- 
stance is,  so  to  say,  new^ly-minted. 
Strauss  is  not  to  be  compared  with 
him  in  this  regard  ;  for  the  basis  of 
the  German  master's  style,  upon 
which  he  has  reared  no  matter 
how  wonderful  a  superstructure,  is 
compounded  of  materials  which 
he  got  straight  from  Richard 
Wagner  and  his  great  forerunner, 
Franz  Liszt;  whereas  the  basis, 
the  starting-point,  of  Debussy's 
style  —  its  harmonic  and  melodic 
stuff — existed  nowhere,  in  any 
artistic  shape   or   condition,  before 

him.     To  speak  of  it  as  in  any  vital 
13  193 


ASPECTS    OF 

sense  a  reversion,  because  it  makes 
use  of  certain  principles  of  plain- 
song,  is  mere  trifling.  Debussy  is 
a  true  innovator,  if  ever  there  was 
one.  He  has  added  fresh  mate- 
rials to  the  matter  out  of  which 
music  is  evolved  ;  and  no  composer 
of  whom  this  may  be  said,  from 
Beethoven  to  Chopin,  has  failed 
to  find  himself  eventually  ranked 
as  the  originator  of  a  new  order 
of  things  in   the   development    of 

the  art. 

VIII 

Those  who  feel  the  beauty  and 

recognise  the  important  novelty  of 

the  music  of  "Pelleas  et  Melisande'' 
194 


MODERN    OPERA 

will  for  some  time  to  come  find  it 
difficult  to  speak  of  it  appreciatively 
without  an  appearance  of  extrava- 
gance. One  owns,  in  trying  to  ap- 
praise it,  to  a  compunction  similar  to 
that  expressed  by  one  of  the  wisest 
of  modern  critics,  when,  after  ap- 
plauding some  notable  poetry,  he 
whimsically  reminded  himself  that 
he  "must  guard  against  too  great 
appreciation,'*  and  "  must  mix  in  a 
little  depreciation,''  to  show  that  he 
had  "  read  attentively,  critically, 
authoritatively."  Well,  there  is  no 
doubt  a  very  definite  risk  in  prais- 
ing too  warmly  a  masterpiece 
which  has  the  effrontery  to  intrude 
195 


ASPECTS    OF 

itself  upon  contemporary  observa- 
tion, and  upon  a  critical  function 
which  has  but  just  compassed  the 
abundantly  painful  task  of  adjusting 
its  views  to  the  masterpieces  of  the 
immediate  past.  I  am  quite  aware 
that  such  praise  of  Debussy's  lyric- 
drama  as  is  spoken  here  will  seem 
to  many  preposterous,  or  at  best 
excessive.  I  am  also  aware  that 
the  mistaking  of  geese  for  swans  is 
a  delusion  which  afflicts  generation 
after  generation  of  over-confident 
critics,  to  the  entertainment  of  sub- 
sequent generations  and  the  inex- 
tinguishable delight  of  the  Comic 

Muse  —  which,   as   Mr.   Meredith 
196 


MODERN    OPERA 

has  pointed  out,  watches  not  more 
vigilantly  over  sentimentalism  than 
over  every  kind  of  excess.  Yet  I 
am  w^illing  to  assert  deliberately, 
and  v^ith  a  perfectly  clear  sense  of 
all  that  the  words  denote  and  imply, 
that  the  score  of  "  Pelleas  ''  is  richer 
in  inner  musical  substance,  in  ideas 
that  are  at  once  new  and  valuable, 
than  anything  that  has  come  out  of 
modern  music  since  Wagner  wrote 
his  final  page  a  quarter  of  a  century 
ago.  The  orchestral  score  is  almost 
as  long  as  that  of  "  Tristan  und 
Isolde  *'  ;  yet  in  the  course  of  its 
409  pages  there  are  scarcely  half  a 

dozen  measures  in  which  one  cannot 

197 


ASPECTS   OF 

point  out  some  touch  of  genius. 
The  music  is  studded  with  felicities. 
One  carries  away  from  a  survey  of 
it  a  conviction  of  its  almost  contin- 
uous inspiration,  of  its  profound 
originality.  The  score  overflows 
with  ideas,  ideas  that  possess  char- 
acter and  nobility,  and  that  are  often 
of  deep  and  ravishing  beauty  —  a 
beauty  that  takes  captive  both  the 
spirit  and  the  sense.  It  is  difficult 
to  think  of  more  than  a  few  scores 
in  which  the  inspiration  is  so  per- 
sistent and  so  fresh  —  in  which  there 
is  so  little  that  is  cliche,  perfunctory, 
derivative.      Certainly,    if     one    is 

thinking  of  music  written  for  the 
198 


MODERN    OPERA 

stage,   one  has  to  go  to  the  author 
of  "Tristan''  for  anything  compa- 
rable to  it.      It  has  been  said  that  in 
this  music  Debussy  is  not  always  at 
his  best,  and  the  comment  is  justi- 
fied.    There  are  passages,  most  of 
them   to   be    found    in    the    inter- 
ludes connecting  the  earlier  scenes 
(which,    it    is    well    known,  were 
extended    to    meet    a    mechanical 
exigency),   wherein    the    fine    and 
rare   gold   of  his  thought  is  inter- 
mixed with  the  dross  of  alien  ideas. 
And  it  is  equally  true  that  the  vast 
and    wellnigh    inescapable   shadow 
of    Wagner's    genius    impinges    at 

moments  upon  the  score :  thus  we 
199 


ASPECTS    OF 

hear  "Parsifal*'  in  the  first  inter- 
lude, "Parsifal''  and  "Siegfried" 
in  the  interlude  following  the  scene 
at  the  fountain  —  the  scene  wherein 
Melisande* s  ring  is  lost.  But  the 
fact  is  mentioned  here  only  that  it 
may  be  dismissed.  The  voice  of 
Debussy  speaks  constantly  out  of 
this  music,  even  when  it  momen- 
tarily takes  the  timbre  of  another ; 
and  none  other,  since  the  superlative 
voice  of  Wagner  himself  was  stilled, 
has  spoken  with  so  potent  and 
magical  a  blend  of  tenderness  and 
passion,  with  so  rare  yet  limpid  a 
beauty,  with  an  accent  so  touching 

and  so  underived. 

200 


MODERN  OPERA 

Thenature  of  Debussy's  harmony, 
and  the  emphasis  which  is  laid  upon 
its  remarkable  quality  by  his  appre- 
ciators,  have  provoked  the  assertion 
that  the  score  of  "  Pelleas  '*  is  de- 
void of  melody,  or  at  least  that  it 
is  v^eak  in  melodic  invention.  Of 
course  the  whole  matter  rests  upon 
what  one  means  by  "melody." 
The  comment  is  a  perfect  exempli- 
fication of  that  critical  method 
which  consists  in  measuring  new 
forms  of  expression  by  the  standards 
of  the  past,  instead  of  seeking  to 
learn  whether  they  do  not  them- 
selves establish  new  standards  by 
which  alone  they  are  to  be  appraised. 


-( 


ASPECTS    OF 

The  method  has  been  applied  to 
every  innovator  in  the  records  of  art, 
and  it  is  probably  futile  to  cry  out 
against  it,  or  to  assert  its  stupidity. 
The  music  of  "Pelleas''  is  rich  in 
melody.  It  does  not,  as  we  have 
seen,  reside  in  the  voice-parts,  for 
there  Debussy,  for  reasons  which 
have  already  been  discussed,  has  de- 
liberately and  wisely  avoided  formal 
melodic  contours.  It  is  to  be  found 
in  the  orchestra  —  an  orchestra 
which,  while  it  depends  in  an  un- 
exampled degree  upon  a  predomi- 
nantly harmonic  mode  of  expression, 
is  at  the  same  time  very  far  from  be- 
ing devoid  of  melodic  effect.  But 
202 


MODERN    OPERA 

the  melody  is  Debussy's  melody  — 
it  is  fatuous  to  expect  to  find  in  this 
score  the  melodic  forms  which  have 
been  made  familiar  to  us  by  the 
practice  of  his  predecessors, —  men 
who  themselves  were  made  to 
bear  the  primeval  accusation  of 
melodic  barrenness.  Debussy's 
melodic  idiom  is  his  own,  and  it 
often  baffles  impatient  or  inhospi- 
table ears  by  reason  of  its  seeming 
indefiniteness,  its  apparently  way- 
ward movement,  and  because  of 
the  shifting  and  mercurial  basis  of 
harmony  upon  which  it  is  imposed. 
It  would  be  easy  to   instance  page 

after  page  in    the  score  where   the 
203 


ASPECTS    OF 

melodic  expression  is,  for  those 
who  are  open  to  its  address,  of 
instant  and  irresistible  effect:  as 
the  greater  part  of  the  scene  by 
the  fountain,  in  the  second  act ;  the 
whole  of  the  tower  scene  —  an 
outpouring  of  rapturous  lyric  beauty 
which,  again,  sends  one  to  the  love- 
liest pages  of  "Tristan"  for  a  com- 
parison; the  affecting  interview 
between  Melisande  and  the  benign 
and  infinitely  wise  Arkely  in  the 
fourth  act;  the  calamitous  love  scene 
in  the  park ;  and  almost  the  whole 
of  the  last  act.  If  Debussy  had 
written  nothing  else  than  the  en- 
trancing music  to  which  he  has  set 
204 


MODERN    OPERA 

the  ecstatic  apostrophe  of  Pelleas  to 
his  beloved's  hair,  he  would  have 
established  an  indisputable  claim  to 
a  melodic  gift  of  an  exquisite  and 
original  kind.  It  has  been  said  that 
he  is  "  incapable  of  writing  sus- 
tained melody ";  and  though  just 
how  extended  a  melodic  line  must 
be  in  order  to  merit  the  epithet 
"sustained"  is  not  quite  clear,  it 
would  seem  that  in  this  particular 
scene,  at  all  events,  Debussy  may  be 
said  to  have  compassed  even  "sus- 
tained ''  melody ;  for  the  melodic 
line  —  varied,  sensitive,  and  plastic 
though   it    is  —  is  here   of  almost 

unbroken  continuity. 

205 


ASPECTS   OF 

In  its  total  aspect  as  a  dramatic 
commentary  the  score  provokes 
wonder  at  its  precision  and  flexibil- 
ity. The  manner  in  which  each 
scene  is  individualised,  differentiated 
and  set  apart  from  every  other  scene, 
is  of  a  vividness  and  fidelity  beyond 
praise.  For  every  changing  aspect 
of  the  play,  for  its  every  emotional 
phase,  the  composer  has  discovered 
the  exact  and  illuminating  equiva- 
lent. The  eloquence  of  this  music 
is  seldom  abated ;  it  is  as  pervasive 
as  it  is  extreme.  One  would  not 
be  far  wrong,  probably,  in  finding 
this   music-drama's  chief  and   final 

claim  to  the  highest  excellence  in 
206 


MODERN    OPERA 

its  triumphant  character  as  an  ex- 
pressional  achievement ;  in  this  it 
ranks  with  the  supreme  things  in 
music.  There  are  in  the  score 
innumerable  passages  which  one 
is  tempted  to  adduce  as  particular 
instances  of  ideally  fit  and  beautiful 
expression.  It  is  probably  unneces- 
sary to  allege  the  quality  of  such 
examples  as  the  scene  by  the  foun- 
tain, the  perilous  encounter  at  the 
tower  window,  the  final  tryst  in 
the  park,  or  the  interlude  which 
accompanies  the  change  of  scene 
from  the  castle  vaults  to  the  sun- 
lit   terrace  above  the   sea  —  music 

that  has  an  entrancing  radiance  and 

207 


ASPECTS    OF 

perfume,  through  which  blows  **  all 
the  air  of  all  the  sea" —  these 
things  will  be  rightly  valued  by 
every  observer  of  liberal  compre- 
hension and  sensitive  discernment: 
to  name  them  is  to  praise  them. 
But  there  are  other  triumphs 
of  expression  in  the  score  whose 
quality  is  not  so  immediately  to  be 
perceived.  I  do  not  speak  of  the 
countless  felicities  of  structural  and 
external  detail :  felicities  which 
will  repay  close  and  protracted 
study.  I  am  thinking  of  remoter, 
less  obvious  felicities :  of  the  grave 
beauty    of    the    passage    in    which 

Genevieve  reads  to  the  King  the  let- 
208 


MODERN    OPERA 

ter  of  Golaud  to  his  brother  Felleas  ^; 
of  the  extraordinary  final  measures 
of  the  first  act,  after  Melts ande  s  ques- 
tion :  "  Oh  !  .  .  .  pourquoi  partez- 
vous?'';  of  the  delicious  effect  which 
is  heard  in  the  orchestra  at  Pelleas* 
words,  in  the  scene  at  the  fountain, 
"  .  .  .  le  soleil  n'entre  jamais";  of 
the  exquisite  setting  of  Golaud' s  ex- 
clamation of  delight  over  the  beauty 
of  Melisande  s  hands ;  of  the  entire 
grotto  scene, —  a  passage  of  superb 
imaginative  fervour, —  with  its  in- 
describably poetic  ending  (the  frag- 


1  As  one  out  of  many  instances  of  similarly  striking  detail, 
observe  the  remarkable  and  moving  progression  in  the  voice- 
part  from  the  D  in  the  ninth  chord  on  B-flat  to  the  B-natural  in 
the  chord  of  G-sharp  minor,  at  Gene'vie-ve' s  words"  .  .  .  tour 
qui  regardela  mer." 

14  209 


ASPECTS   OF 

ment  of  a  descending  scale  given  out 
in  imitation  by  two  flutes  and  a 
harp) ;  of  the  passage  in  the  tower 
scene  where  the  two  solo  violins  in 
octaves  sing  the  ravishing  phrase 
that  accompanies  the  "  Regarde,  re- 
garde,  j*embrasse  tes  cheveux  .  .  ." 
of  the  enraptured  Pelleas ;  of  the 
piercing  effect  of  the  Melts ande 
theme  where  it  is  combined  with 
that  of  Pelleas  in  the  interlude 
which  follows  the  scene  at 
the  tower  window;  of  the  pas- 
sage preceding  the  entrance  of 
Me  lis  ande  and  Ark'el  in  the  fourth 
act,  where  Melts  ande' s  theme  is 
heard  in  augmentation;  of  the  pas- 


2IO 


MODERN    OPERA 

sage  in  the  transitional  music  follow- 
ing the  misusing  of  Melisande  by 
Golaud  where  her  theme  is  played 
by  the  oboe  above  an  interchanging 
phrase  in  the  horns  —  a  diminuendo 
of  inexpressible  poignancy  ;  of  the 
impassioned  soliloquy  oi Pelleas  pre- 
paratory to  the  nocturnal  meeting  in 
the  park;  of  the  theme  which  is 
played  by  the  horns  and  'cellos  as  he 
invites  Melisande  to  come  out  of  the 
moonlight  into  the  shadow  of  the 
trees  ;  of  the  exquisite  phrase  given 
out  by  the  strings  and  a  solo  horn  as 
he  asks  her  if  she  knows  why  he 
wished  her  to  meet  him  ;  of  the  in- 
terplay of  "  ninth  '*  chords  which  is 

211 


ASPECTS    OF 

heard,  in  the  final  act,  when  Arkel 
asks  Melisande  if  she  is  cold,  and  the 
mysterious  majesty  of  the  passage 
which  immediately  follows,  as 
Melisande  says  that  she  wishes 
the  window  to  remain  open 
until  the  sun  has  sunk  into  the 
sea ;  of,  indeed,  the  whole  of 
the  incomparable  music  of  Melu 
sande's  death;  and  finally,  of  that 
scene  wherein  the  genius  of  the 
musician  and  musical  dramatist  is, 
as  I  think,  most  characteristically 
exerted:  the  curiously  potent  and 
haunting  scene  in  which  Pelleas  and 
Melisande,  with  Genevieve,  watch  the 
departure  of  the  ship  from  the  port 

212 


MODERN    OPERA 

and  speak  of  the  approaching  storm. 
Here  Debussy,  in  setting  the  simple 
yet  elliptical  speeches  of  the  two 
tragedians,  has  written  music  which 
is  of  marvellously  subtle  eloquence 
in  its  suggestion  of  the  atmosphere 
of  impending  disaster,  of  vague 
foreboding  and  oppressive  mystery, 
which  rests  upon  the  scene.  The 
penetrating  "On  s'embarquerait 
sans  le  savoir  et  Ton  ne  reviendrait 
plus"  oiPelleaSy  sung  over  a  linger- 
ing series  of  descending  chords  of 
the  ninth;  the  strange,  receding 
song  of  the  departing  sailors;  the 
passage   in  triplets  which  is  heard 

when  Pelleas  speaks  of  the  beacon 
213 


ASPECTS    OF 

light  shining  dimly  through  the 
mist ;  the  veiled  and  sinister  phrase 
in  thirds  on  the  muted  horns  which 
follows  the  dying-away  of  the  sail- 
ors' call :  these  are  salient  moments 
in  a  masterly  piece  of  psychological 
and  (there  is  no  other  word  for  it) 
subliminal  delineation. 

Whatever  Debussy  may  in  the 
future  accomplish — and  it  is  not 
unlikely  that  he  may  transcend  this 
score  in  adventurousness  and  novelty 
of  style  —  will  not  imperil  the 
unique  distinction,  the  unique  value, 
of  "Pelleas  et  Melisande/'  It  has 
had,  it  has  been  truly  said,  no  prede- 
cessor, no  forerunner ;  and  there  is 
214 


MODERN    OPERA 

nothing  in  the  musical  art  that  is 
now  contemporary  with  it  which 
in  the  remotest  degree  resembles  it 
in  impulse  or  character.  That,  as 
an  example  of  the  ideal  welding  of 
drama  and  music,  it  will  exert  a 
formative  or  suggestive  influence,  it 
is  not  now  possible  to  say ;  but  that 
its  extraordinary  importance  as  a 
work  of  art  will  compel  an  ever- 
widening  appreciation,  seems,  to 
many,  certain  and  indisputable. 
Thinking  of  this  score,  Debussy 
might  justly  say,  with  Coventry  Pat- 
more:  **I  have  respected  posterity." 


NOTE 

Some  of  the  material  contained  in 
the  foregoing  studies  appeared  origin- 
ally in  articles  published  in  Harper  s 
Weekly y  The  North  American  Review ^^ind 
The  Musician,  But  for  the  most  part 
the  essays  are  new;  and  such  passages  of 
earlier  origin  as  are  retained  have  been 
considerably  altered  and  amplified. 


w 


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.     .  J  vai>-^ 

o\m  JO  1982 

13oU 

pcp'rv  m\^s^ 

AUG  2  9  1983 

DEC     7 1952 

JUN    6  1963 

DEC  i  8  1963 

SEP  1  0  1968 

,  „_  ^  R  IpCR 

OCT  lo  iy<'» 

MI\P  2  2  19G9 

MAY    3  1969 

JUL    71978 

MAR  2  3 1979 

?Als^rir,%^6^                        U.i.^^£igSLnia 

30245& 


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